I have addressed the money saving opportunities a number of times on this blog, but another great benefit that conference calls provide is the environmental benefits. Yes, conference calls can help you go green!
Conference calls do offer a number of benefits to it users in saving money and increasing productivity. Conference calls also give its users the ability to conduct their meetings without travel which is where the opportunity to help save the environment comes in. I am not aware of any study that has come up with but if you just use the numbers we know you come up with some staggering statistics. In 2009 it is estimated that there will be about 50 Billion minutes of audio conferencing alone done in just the US. If you use an average conference call of 5 people for 45 minutes you get approximately 225,000,000 conference calls being held with an average of 5 people. If the 5 participants in these conference calls only had to travel an average of five miles to get together face to face they would have to travel a total of 5.5 billion miles. And if you use an average of 18 miles per gallon of fuel you will see that they used a total of 300 million gallons of gasoline to travel to these meetings. That is the total amount of gasoline the US burns in a single day.
And I think if you think about the calculation you quickly realize that I used some pretty soft numbers, like the 5 miles average travel distance. I would bet that it is closer to 100 miles or more considering that people are doing conference calls on a global basis and most people would not even be able to drive to a meeting that has been replaced by a conference call. If you include flights and taxis and rental cars that would be involved in all these meetings I would not be surprised to hear that replacing 225 million conference calls with in-person meetings would save over a billion gallons of gasoline.
So, as you can see, using conference calls instead of doing in-person meetings doesn’t just save you money and time, but it also helps save the environment.