Relationship between Business Travels and Virtual Meetings: How organizations can use virtual meetings effectively to reduce business travels?

Sammanfattning: Climate change are starting to receive more attention, even so, transport sector is responsible for approximately 20% of energy related GHG emission, which still has increasing trend. Solutions based on using information and communication technologies are started to be used for reducing anthropogenic GHG emissions and replacing business related travels. Meetings that is held by using ICT, can save money and time as compared to its travel alternative, reduce environmental impact, as well as increase productivity. Especially during financial crisis, business organizations see the importance of managing business travels efficiently. However, adopting VMs into an organization do not automatically reduce the business. In order to achieve the benefits of replacing VMs need to be implemented in an organization effectively by controlling negative rebound effects. The aim of this research is to investigate the ways to reduce environmental impacts of the business related travels and the role of VMs to do that. It also aimed to find the most effective way to use VMs by controlling the negative rebound effect. Other than literature review, the information is gathered through three different source; REMM Project, surveys with travel managers and in-depth interviews with the employees of a large international retail company. According to the finding, after VM development, there are three possible scenarios for the organizations’ business travel trends. For decreasing business travel trend, rebound effect need to be controlled and VMs need to implement effectively. The successful VM adaptations are investigated under five different levels; policy-maker level, organizational (upper management) level, project management level, employee level, technical level. Additionally, for the rebound effects two indicators are selected; the increase in business travel volume and the number of VMs and their durations. Based on these two indicators mitigation measures are developed.