Running a business brings with it a great deal of responsibility. You have to be able to make decisions which could impact you tremendously, as well as all of your colleagues, employees, partners, and families. But your responsibility is also much broader than this: a responsibility to your society – to conduct your business ethically and honestly – and to your planet.
It’s increasingly important that we all work together to reduce our collective carbon footprint upon the Earth, and taking little steps can make a huge difference. One option that you have within your professional life is incorporating conference calling more firmly into your every day routine.
Meetings
By making use of some of the great conference call bridges available, you could massively reduce your negative impact upon the environment. For example, you can often avoid travelling to meetings with a conference call. If, say, you have investors, partners, shareholders, all over the country – or even the world – you can simply hold audio meetings via conference call rather than all travel to one place. That way, you reduce travel emissions significantly.
Working From Home
Similarly, anybody whose work can be done from home, or closer to home, can do so by staying in touch using regular virtual meetings. A commute of as little as 20 miles adds up to at least 1.4tonnes of CO2 every year. That’s a huge amount, and for those even further afield, the amount of emissions you could cut could be even larger. Allowing more employees to work from their own homes can not only widen the scope of potential employees you could hire, but could save companies £3bn and 3million tonnes of carbon emissions every single year. Save yourself and your employees time and money by reducing travel, and help save the planet too.
Interviewing Candidates
Travel to interviews could also be slashed massively. Particularly in the earlier stages, conference calls can be a great way to interview potential new employees, saving them the need to travel to your offices. Again, cutting travel means cutting emissions, and overall helping reduce your carbon footprint.
Briefing and Teaching
Instead of bringing a team all to one location to brief them on a task, this can be conducted over the phone, without reducing the potential for interaction, questions and discussion. Similarly, even tutors and instructors could reduce their carbon footprint by conducting lessons with students over the phone, rather than having them meet you elsewhere. In fact, anybody whose job entails travel – whether on your part or somebody else’s – should consider the potential of teleconferences to replace the meetings and reduce the negative impact upon our planet.
