ways2work > How to do it > Re-thinking business travel > Using ICT to reduce business travel > Communication tools > Face-to-face meeting
Face-to-face meeting
A face to face meeting is the most natural way for people to communicate and is also the richest communication medium we have. It is the best tool for any interactive discussion or collaborative work as well as for building relationships and feelings of fellowship and camaraderie.
But although it is the best tool available, in many cases we cannot use it without travelling and business travel has significant drawbacks. Travel is expensive, disruptive, often bad for you and creates a carbon footprint. We therefore want to use face to face meetings that involve travel only sparingly. We want to treat travel for meetings as precious and only do so when a face to face meeting does the job significantly better than any of the alternatives.
So when are face to face meetings essential or highly desirable? There is no exact science but custom and practice suggests the following.
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Because of its value in supporting highly-interactive discussion and building relationships, a face to face meeting is particularly valuable for early stages of acquiring customers, for example sales meetings and negotiations. This is supported by a US survey of business travel
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Similarly, face to face meetings are valuable for networking and extending a business's customer base. This is the second-most cited reason that UK company directors travelled by air
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Face to face interaction is also recommended for customer meetings whose purpose is to build an inter-personal or inter-organisational relationship or to deal with contentious or emotionally-charged issues
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Another reason to meet face to face is to build commitment and feelings of fellowship: for example amongst people who work together at a distance. It can also be valuable for helping with a personal crisis.
A face to face meeting is not, however, essential for tasks that involve dealing with uncontentious issues, working together on documents, briefing others, or discussing or exchanging information. If you can hold a face to face meeting for these purposes without travelling, then it may be the right choice. But if the meeting involves significant travel, ICT-based communication tools handle these tasks well. A 2008 survey of 100 FTSE companies for WWF found 82 % expecting to travel to fewer meetings.