April 23, 2008 - Conferencing to avoid business travel beat out recycling and working with greener suppliers as the top strategy for greening business, according to new survey from InterCall, a conferencing solutions firm. Two-thirds of the 900 employees surveyed said their companies use remote conferencing to help reduce the size of their carbon footprint.

The telephone is still king, according to the survey, with 75% of companies relying on conference calls to get the job done. Web and video technologies have improved drastically in recent years, however. Sixty-three percent of respondents say the meet via the internet, and half use videoconferencing on a regular basis.

The payoffs can be significant: British Telecom, for example, cut CO2 emissions by nearly 100,000 metric tons thanks to videoconferencing, which eliminated the need for more than 860,000 face-to-face staff meetings, according to a company survey.

Why is conferencing becoming such a popular green strategy? For starters, it's easy - and cheap. "Avoiding travel by using conferencing is a change businesses can make that is immediate and easy to implement," says Carolyn Campbell, senior director of marketing for InterCall. "They can easily reduce their footprint without expensive changes to their product or processes...it's simply a change in behavior."

Teleworking is on the rise as well, according to the InterCall survey. Seventy-one percent of  respondents said their companies enable employees to telecommute on a full or part-time basis and, of those, 25% actively encourage the practice.

Nearly a third (31%) of respondents reported that their company is planning to complete a carbon footprinting project within the next year.