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Online meetings have become the norm during the Covid-19 pandemic. fizkes / Getty Images
Taking business trips – or even just commuting to work – can produce a lot of carbon pollution. But for a long time, many people resisted the alternative of remote work and virtual meetings.
Elise Keith is the founder of Lucid Meetings, an online meeting management and consulting company.
“People enjoy coming and being together in the same place whenever possible, in fact to the degree that everybody believed that that was really the only way to have an effective meeting,” she says.
But the COVID-19 pandemic forced many companies to give virtual meetings a serious and sustained try.
Keith says that after people got comfortable with the technology, they started realizing that with good planning and organization, online meetings can be effective. They can even help build community.
“The CEO would show up from their home just like they were and their kids would walk in,” Keith says. “And people began to look at that and connect, like, ‘Oh these are real people I work with who really care about what we’re doing.'”
So Keith expects that even after it’s safe to meet in person again, many companies will choose to rely more often on virtual meetings.
She says employees enjoy them, they can save companies money, and they’re better for the climate.
Reposted with permission from Yale Climate Connections.