Travel reduction

Enabling new ways of working to cut unnecessary travel

As an IT services company, we have long promoted the benefits of teleconferencing, video conferencing and home working as ways of reducing the total road and air miles travelled by our staff.

We recently commissioned an independent report from Datamonitor on our conferencing efforts. In summary the report identified that both the environment and Fujitsu Services's business would benefit from a sustained reduction in business travel. Read the report summary and download the full report.

In general, our philosophy is one of continual improvement based on the belief that the accumulation of lots of small actions can produce large effects. Too many businesses, we think, waste effort on eye-catching initiatives with little thought for what will prove most effective in the long run.

Of course, sometimes certain programmes produce too small a result to make a significant effect. Such is the case for our car sharing scheme. We set it up using the latest car share software from the Transport Research Laboratory. This was accompanied by the development of green travel plans to help reduce CO2 emissions on the daily commute.

In practice, however, the scheme hasn’t been as successful as we’d liked. Across the UK only a handful of employees have taken up the option of using the scheme. The reason? It seems that people are still reluctant to car-share, believing that home-working and video conferencing are far more practical and flexible options.

Were we disappointed? Yes. Were we downhearted? No.

Sustainability is a moving target and many of the areas that we’re exploring are still untested. Even in apparent failure, we’ve learn valuable lessons about where we should focus our efforts and the kind of initiatives that are likely to prove effective in future.