Expert View: Sorry I can't take your call right now. I'm in a meeting... again

Most people in business have a strong sense that meetings are demanding more and more of their time. Fifty years ago meetings were barely necessary – the boss decided what was going to happen and told employees in a curt office memo. Clear instructions flowed through the organisation along well-established chains of command.

Now everything in business is discussed extensively in large meetings attended by anybody who has the remotest interest in the subject. The gradual erosion of formal systems of authority has increased the appetite for face-to-face meetings. Consultation and discussion has taken the place of direct instruction. Larger and more complex organisations have more meetings than smaller companies, even adjusting for their greater size. Senior managers in the very biggest organisations now seem to do little else than flit from one discussion to another. Even junior employees typically spend six hours a week in meetings.

The amount of travel to get to these meetings is increasing. More than nine million people passed through Heathrow in 2005 on the way to internal company events, almost as many as those visiting customers. This number was up half a million on five years before. Increases in global trade and in corporate mergers of companies on different continents are tending to increase the need for long-distance travel to meetings.

As a consequence, corporate travel is a growing part of UK carbon emissions. It would be easy to say we must reverse the trend towards more meetings to reduce the climate-change impact of modern business. Unfortunately, it is not going to be easy. Some interesting recent research shows that most of the attendees at corporate meetings do complain about the waste of time involved. But when questioned in private, the picture changes. Only 15 per cent of people rated their most recent meeting adversely. Though most attendees saw room for improvement, meetings were valuable both in helping build plans for action and in making employees feel part of the organisation.

The researchers comment that meetings play a large role in employee socialisation, relationship building and shaping of the corporate culture. The unpalatable fact is that huge organisations contain such complexity and ambiguity that the rising number of meetings plays a vital role in giving employees some sense of their employer's objectives and tactics. People in large, amorphous organisations may find it difficult to do without the reassurance and information gained by frequent contact with colleagues.

But do these meetings have to be face-to-face? BT recently presented some data on the success of its internal voice conferencing. In the most recent year, more than two million telephone conferences took place in the company. BT estimates a saving of over £200m from the use of this technology and a cut of almost 100,000 tonnes of CO2. Typically, these multi-person phone conferences each avoided travel of several hundred miles. BT also said that use of voice conferencing at Tesco, one of its customers, improved an office worker's productivity by the suspiciously precise figure of 18 per cent. Each phone meeting saved an average of almost £200 in travel costs.

Of course BT has a clear interest in telling us that phone meetings are a good substitute for wasteful corporate get-togethers. An increasing amount of its marketing is focusing on the climate change benefits of good use of telecommunications. But looking at the figures from BT's study, the cost savings are far more eye-catching. Getting British business to move to video and audio-conferencing has important implications for profitability. So far, such conferencing has struggled to take off as people have tended to prefer to travel. It is, after all, rather more difficult to understand the boss's body language over the phone. Nevertheless, BT's research on the considerable benefits of conferencing is plausible. Rather than try to get rid of apparently unproductive meetings, we need to find ways to make telephone and video conferences ever better substitutes for those traditional meetings at which 20 disparate colleagues sit round a table for three hours in a shabby motel off the M6.

Chris Goodall's 'How to Live a Low-carbon Life' is published by Earthscan at £14.99. C.goodall@which.net