Business Travel or Remote Collaboration?

It can easily be tricky to compare benefits and drawbacks of remote collaboration solutions vs physical travels. Surveys usually focus on technologic characteristics when behaviour or social aspects are sometimes left behind. Of course we know that adopting new ways of collaboration compared to business travel is consuming less CO2, is cheaper than plane tickets and allow you to save more time. You can try right now the travel impact calculator and estimate your savings in term of CO2, time and costs.

Thereby, at Arkadin we have decided to support a survey run by IFOP and WWF aimed at knowing business travellers’ motivations. This survey has been administrated to 2 different cross-sections:

• 1 defined by IFOP thanks to cross-section standards, administrated to people who travelled for business at least once in the previous year
• 1 defined and driven by Arkadin, administrated to their most regular remote collaboration services users.

Before all, we found in the survey that most of the business international travels are appreciated. Meanwhile remote collaboration is well welcomed as an alternative to travel by most of business community, but according to many surveys, employees need to be educated and familiarized with these solutions to really adopt and use them aptly; indeed the process of acceptation depends on this familiarisation. 

Arkadin to report that clients who decided during the 2009 crisis to cut business travels, have increased their remote collaboration in a tremendous ratio. More interesting was to discover, that after the crisis, the usage of remote collaboration tools is maintained, and travels have beenreduced by far. Arkadin to think that the challenge is more about being able to change business habits, than pushing the tangible benefits of remote collaboration vs business travels. Arkadin finaly thinks there are 3 ways to facilitate and accelerate habits changes:

• Offer real personal benefits to remote collaboration tools end users
• Share the feeling to be part of a global positive behaviour ( small individual changes can lead big differences)
• Be more affordable than other collaboration ways ( conference call vs travels)

Even if there are many business travels that seem to be essential or even pleasant, a lot remain easily replaceable. For instance, big companies try to move towards alternative and sustainable solutions, globally, through travel or environmental policies. Still, there is a lot to do especially in term of raising consciousness and controlling travels within the companies or organisations. That is why Arkadin designed the Climate Care Day . This event is aimed to help you sensitise your employees in an attractive way to the new collaboration challenges.

We have identified 5 incontrovertible motivations to travel:

• The physical contact
• The fact that travelling shows interest for the interlocutor
• The opportunity to meet people we virtually work with everyday
• The random encounter
• The pleasure to travel and cumulate air miles

First of all, the most important element, raised by every survey, is the physical contact. It allows people to get more clues about encounter thanks to body language, head-shaking, voice intonation, significant silence and any other signs. According to the surveys, the eye contact is the most important component of physical meeting. Indeed eyes carry emotions like confidence, intimacy, fear, power, control...

Although it is hard to restore all this elements with digital tools; technology helps improve video and audio quality and allows user to meet in conditions closer and closer to reality.

Arkadin can support you in taking the challenge to train and educate your employees to new ways of collaboration. Is it still worth travelling? Is it still necessary to meet physically? How about learning how to understand people and know them to better collaborate? From now, have a look to the 5+1 “senses” for a successful collaboration (links to the page “The 5 senses of successful collaboration”) to understand more about the future benefits our solutions will bring you.

The interlocutor usually perceives the move as interest. For instance, in crisis situation (social crisis, redundancy...), in order to solve the problem and be part of the resolution of it, the decision maker needs to be present. Top managers are also meant to travel to remain close from their teams.

They usually need to balance their time between the headquarters and stockholders. Not visiting them can sometimes be perceived as a sign of exclusion from the market or the “community”. Also, young employees see travels as a mark of confidence from their managers. The previous points show that we are more likely to favour contact. But why wouldn’t we begin to put the environment first? At Arkadin, through our solutions, we want to carry the CHANGE.

The mind-sets are already evolving and habits are changing to remote collaboration. Let’s support this progress together! The stake, identified by Arkadin, is to teach people why the first meeting is so important for future collaboration. Knowing the one you are working with, understanding their culture, working in their environmental are few key points for successful upcoming cooperation.

At Arkadin, we strongly believe that Empathy is the capacity to move to a deep understanding of what we all share in our meetings. It is important for us to reach this level of understanding in order to recommend regular use of remote collaboration tools. Eventually not travelling would be accepted as a mark of confidence; the non-traveller would show his trust to his interlocutor. In a word, Empathy is a key to have successful collaboration. Arkadin provides solutions to collaborate differently in your daily working days in order to help you change habits and mentalities.

In a global economy and society, more and more contacts are virtually made, that is why punctual meetings are made to gather physically these communities; thus seminars, conferences, forum, holidays are being hold to maintain our connections.

Thanks to our survey we discover that the principle goal of business travel is to collaborate with the company’s network. As for instance there are more and more big international companies, employees still maintain that their travels give value in terms of management, coherency between the workforce and subsidiaries.

At Arkadin, we think that the challenge remains in the ability for employees to enhance their collaboration effectiveness. Did you know that, for instance, Arkadin can strengthen your 5+1 “senses” of collaboration especially the sense of ubiquity, being present in different place at the same time?!

This element is incontrovertible; indeed while people are travelling they might bump into someone randomly during a break, meet people during dinners or even in airports. It is also important to build a network, to socialise, to be known... Yet, nowadays, people mainly build their network online, thanks to social networking. Many tools have already proven their effectiveness (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace...).

At Arkadin, we will give you the opportunity to understand how leveraging the use of social medias within your company. They facilitate the construction of strong networks inside and outside your organisations while you are managing them remotely.

We have found that not only business travel allows people to meet physically interesting business contacts but it is also considered as an escape from home life or from professional daily duties. In addition it gives the opportunity to visit the city or the region where people travel. Moreover, the interest for air miles stays noteworthy when it comes to travel by plane. A significant part of the travellers use these miles for their personal use. One of the reasons is that a lot of them decide themselves whether or not they travel.

At Arkadin, we believe that, in a more and more competitive and developed economy, companies may tend to enhance their collaboration effectiveness in order to save travel costs. Aren’t you better at home close to your relatives than having dinner alone at your hotel? Furthermore, we also believe than another issue remains in the restriction of travel through strict company environmental policy. Business travel needs to have a better control in order to let the employees think about the real necessity of travelling. Maybe we must think about business travel as a constraint and remote collaboration as an effectiveness winning, time and effort saving tool.

At Arkadin, we like to say that we want to stand in favour of travelling for pleasure, for holidays. Travelling is very important to discover the world, it richness and also to learn from people and about ourselves. In the meantime, we understand that travel can be part of collaboration, but we need to rethink the way we meet people and trust remote collaboration to build stronger relationships.
Why wouldn’t we meet stockholders once in order to know them and better collaborate? This survey was made to underline the fact that most of our business travels are not necessary or at least replaceable by new ways of collaboration. We also believe that we can share even more by collaborating remotely thanks to a full unified collaboration offer including Audio, Video and Web conferencing solutions, mobile apps (iPhone, BlackBerry), desktop apps, web portals, Audio and Web Event & Webcast. These tools will help you move forward to the new edge of “augmented reality”.

To sum up, motivations for business travels are multiple and strong. We have to consider these motivations as irresponsible, unsustainable and not attractive (high fuel price, Climate Change, new alternatives). Start now working in the new edge of collaboration! Arkadin will support any company in this change and provide collaboration services that will make them save money, time and cut CO2 emissions.