Ten tips to reduce carbon emissions using videoconferencing

Videoconferencing solutions provider Tandberg has produced a list of 10 ways in which videoconferencing can help reduce a company’s carbon footprint.

Tandberg claims that its own 1400 employees worldwide conduct more than 75,000 videoconferencing and tele-presence calls monthly (an average of more than two each per working day). The company also maintains that its customers find they can reduce the need to travel by up to 30%. It cites delivery company TNT, which implemented videoconferencing estimated to cut travel by 20%, saving €11 million over four years and significantly reducing carbon emissions.

The 10 tips are:

1. Telecommuting — Enable people to work from home. Save on real estate and operational costs, while increasing productivity and morale of employees (no traffic).
2. Access to remote experts — Connecting customers and employees to experts and advisers face to face through video communications saves time, money and carbon emissions, while increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
3. Global meetings — No need for everyone to take long flights. Just a quick call from the desk and everyone can meet face to face without the carbon emissions.
4. Customer briefing centres — Video communication unites purchasers, clients, and sales and technical staff in real time to facilitate instant decision making and collaboration, while reducing the negative environmental impacts from travel.
5. Work/life balance — Employees who are always on the road often report more stress, less productivity and reduced job satisfaction. Using video instead increases morale, productivity and collaboration.
6. Distance learning — Schools, hospitals and other training facilities get an added lesson in conservation when they connect via videoconferencing to remote institutions to enhance learning opportunities and save on costs.
7. Research and development — Designers and researchers around the globe can hold live face-to-face discussions about product design and carry out component modifications during video meetings.
8. Team building — Multiple offices don’t have to mean isolated teams. Videoconferencing helps enhance collaboration and build camaraderie without associated wastes of travel.
9. HR recruiting — Initial face-to-face screenings of out-of-town candidates by video can cut costs and carbon emissions while allowing managers to read candidates’ facial expressions.
10. Real-time collaboration — Organisations can deal with large amounts of rich data and collaborate in real time from multiple locations with the visual and multimedia capabilities of videoconferencing.

Editor's comment: Clearly Tandberg had to stretch a point to make it up to 10 tips, but it does demonstrate a variety of ways that videoconferencing can have a positive impact on an organisation, as well as saving travel costs and carbon emissions. It will certainly become ubiquitous in the future and an increasingly important aspect of corporate ICT.