The green side of IP telephony

Up until two months ago, I was a horrible carbon dioxide offender. No excuses, really, other than the fact that my daily commute took me over two bridges from my New Jersey home out to Long Island. My duties demanded serious "face time" with my staff.

Days when the New York Yankees played a home game were especially bad: Crawling the six miles or so on the Cross Bronx Expressway could often take at least a half hour. Can you say choke? And I don't mean the batters.

Anyway, given this background, I was naturally disposed to notice the results of a survey about telecommuting commissioned by systems integrator Dimension Data. (The poll was conducted by Datamonitor and covered 524 workers and 390 managers.)

According to the findings, only 55 percent of U.S. companies fully support flexible work environments, allowing employees to work from home, or telecommute. That compares with 75 percent of companies in France, and was the lowest percentage when the United States was compared with Australia and all the European regions included as part of the survey.

The U.S. respondents also different from their European and Australian counterparts in another major respect: they cite “employee retention” as the primary motivator for establishing a flex environment. European and Australian companies see “increasing employee productivity” as the biggest plus.

More than half of ALL respondents DO agree that fully flexible work environments will predominate within five years, with technologies such as VoIP communications applications paving the way.

If you think about it, unified communications products are truly worthy members of the green technology spectrum. Not only do they cut down on unnecessary travel, they also promise to decrease electricity usage through innovations such as power over Ethernet. Got any success stories to share. Indulge me with an e-mail.