Sony Mobile Communications is aiming to reduce its heavy
reliance on travel through improved use of virtual conferencing. The mobile phone
manufacturing company internally has positioned travel as only one option among
several for employees to collaborate. Senior manager for global meeting and
travel Philip Haxne, based in Lund, Sweden, said half the journey to success
has been completed by installing high-quality virtual conferencing options
that, critically, operate on a separate network from other corporate functions.
Now he has embarked on the second half of the journey, with a demand-management
strategy intended to persuade employees to consider virtual conferencing as an
alternative—and often a preferable one—to travel.
Haxne believes many companies will follow a similar course
in the future. "In the coming years, there will be more collaboration
managers than travel managers," he said. "It's the meeting that is
important, and our job is to facilitate that. Knowledge sharing is very
important in a company like ours."
Haxne's perspective is informed by the department in which
he works, which Sony Mobile calls Workplace Solutions. The department reports
to human resources and is tasked with improving the well-being of employees
wherever they work, whether at a company facility, in a home office or on the
road. At present, there is a great deal of the latter. With a global reach and
a workforce that is highly dispersed but needs constantly to work together,
Sony Mobile's 8,000 employees notch up 34,000 trips per year. One particular
intercontinental flight has an average of 13 employees per day on board, while
one regional flight has 24 employees per day.
Telephone conferencing also is big at Sony Mobile (1.5
million minutes per month), but the company realized it also needed to offer
more sophisticated non-travel collaboration options. When Haxne became involved
after introducing in 2011 a global travel process, Sony Mobile already was
deploying heavy-duty telepresence technology, but it was only available at a
limited number of company locations.
Haxne took over the budget, tools and governance of virtual
meetings as the company introduced smaller, easier-to-use conferencing units.
Most crucially, the new units ran on their own network, which means virtual
conferences do not have to compete for bandwidth with other large data
transfers—something that often affects transmission quality.
Was the creation of an independent network expensive?
"No," said Haxne, "not in relation to what we are trying to save
in travel costs. And having your own network is not as expensive as you might
think. It has definitely been worth it. Our use of virtual meetings has
increased in the first three months of introducing the network."
Coaxing Choices
Despite this success, to date there has been only a
"slight decrease" in trip bookings, according to Haxne. "We are
not yet where we want to be," he said. "Now that we have put in the
infrastructure, the next part is demand management: talking to employees and
budget managers."
In particular, Haxne is drawing their attention to
comprehensive reporting on the total cost of travel—not just the flight, but
also accommodation and other daily living costs, such as dining. Haxne largely
is aiming to convert internal meetings away from travel, and he has three
years' worth of data to show managers and travelers what the purpose of their
trips has been. The company's guidance—it does not like to mandate—is that the
first encounter between colleagues can be face-to-face to build the
relationship, but subsequent project status updates should be virtual.
Haxne also is communicating that virtual collaboration has
the potential to offer new ways of working. For example, he is poised to pilot
technology that makes automated searches of notes taken during meetings, using
tools such as virtual whiteboards. The system analyzes whether any key words
are recorded in different meetings. "A message pops up telling the
employee that someone else has been taking similar notes, and they may want to
talk to each other," Haxne said. "It can be more exciting this way
because you can connect people with a head start."
One technology Haxne is less enthusiastic about is finding a
system that offers booking options for travel and virtual meetings alongside
one another on the same page. "I believe it is too late if someone has got
that far," he said. "The decision takes place before they go into the
system. And no one is really offering that in a good way today."
Haxne stressed the demand-management drive is a work in
progress. He hopes to see a more pronounced shift toward virtual collaboration
by the middle of 2015.
This report originally appeared in the February 2015 edition of Travel Procurement.