How Facebook can save the planet, free up executive time and make happy clients

Controversialist Dominic Mason urges us not to give up on our 'skin time'.

Travel costs UK businesses millions of pounds per year but, in business development terms, it's a cost worth paying. A study on behalf of the NBTA (National Business Travel Association) of America calculated that the return on investment for business travel is around 17%. Away from hard facts, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence for the effectiveness of face-to-face meetings, and every sales person knows that phrases such as 'spending skin time' and 'pressing the flesh' have a real, profitable value.

So, skimming a couple of thousand pounds off your business travel expenses is probably imprudent… IF you carve the money straight off at the expense of contact time, and there are plenty of e-alternatives for contact. It's the use and efficacy of these alternatives that are usually the issues around their adoption.

Let's tackle the efficacy first. Looking for tangible business benefits, I can immediately quote the implementation of Facebook-style internal profiling and web-based meetings and the use of other 'contact' technology, by a very large international business, to supplement the usual, horrendous conference calls. A minor pilot involving less than 7% of the executive workforce alone saved the company £0.5m but, as stated above, that cost trimming is not worth a lot. However, the other, surrounding, tangible benefits were equally impressive. 10% fewer emails, 11% more time spent on 'core work tasks', 9% greater 'satisfaction with work practices'- clearly something is going on here, something big.

The answer is... it's a question of balance. In a bid to reduce travel costs this business had discovered that, unlike the usual IT-focused technology deployment, the decision to roll out a group of simple web-based meeting technologies was changing their business model and that of their internal and external clients. People liked doing this stuff, so they did more of it. Yes, there were still face-to-face meetings, but now people were having less of them and, incredibly, being more effective.

This brings us to the second point - use. If we assume that email is 'broken', web access at work is a management/HR nightmare and Instant Messaging is similarly 'challenging' - here's a technology suite that's popular and can have practical business, and personal, benefits.

How did the telco above manage to stop themselves deploying this brave new world overnight, everywhere? They created a partnership between IT and HR that blended the best elements of both: 'yes' to blended training and an internal marketing budget; 'yes' to technical rigour across the group; 'no' to open access via an intranet from day one; 'no' to overnight installment and pdf manuals scattered by email.

So, you can't and shouldn't totally remove your travel costs to get your conscience straight, but your business can reduce your travel costs AND be more effective. Hopefully, that will light a (low energy) light bulb above many people's heads.