Granted the source has a vested interest in this startling data but, even setting that aside, me'thinks there might be some ground truth here in regard to our ongoing interest in green teams. Thanks to Michael Sampson, I've been alerted to Elissa Hunter's Sept 2, '08 article in Business Travel News Online, Meetings In Profile: Verizon Drives Remote Meetings, wherein a Verizon employee says that face-to-face meetings are not only more expensive than virtual ones--but they are astonishingly more costly, as in "five to 35 times more."
"Let's face it, we have to be cost-conscious and environmentally smart, so that needs to be mirrored in the way we travel," said Debra Goldmann, senior specialist for Verizon Travel Services. "We took a look at how much people actually spend for a certain type of meeting versus how much they would spend for a virtual meeting. We found that a face-to-face meeting is between five and 35 times more expensive than a virtual meeting."
The article goes on to explain how Verizon is chewing up its own phone lines (which I guess is the proper phrasing as analagous to a pet food company eating its own dog food), with senior execs "actually stopping their face-to-face staff
meetings in favor of an immersive video experience. Aside from the
financial savings of not traveling, they save so much time by not
having to bring everybody to one location for what could be a two- or
three-hour meeting," according to another Verizon official.
