OTN Member organizations who take full advantage of their Videoconference Studios know they have a Golden Goose on their hands. The travel cost and productivity savings of videoconferencing can be very significant – and OTN’s Cost Savings Calculator shows you how.
If your staff are in the habit of getting in a car to drive to a regional meeting or an education event, they are incurring costs that can often be eliminated while taking advantage of the rich interactive experience of videoconferencing. Here’s how:
- Travel Costs – Even if you are not in the North, Ontario’s geography and urban traffic can leave your staff behind the wheel instead of where they need to be. OTN has done some research and produced an online calculator to help you get a better picture of how your organization can become more efficient.
- Productivity – Spending valuable expertise on unnecessary travel can be avoided with videoconferencing. Your organization has done its best to recruit, train, and support your staff. What makes more sense - a short walk down the hall or travel time that can be avoided?
- Webcasting – Stream your videoconference to the web. Even if your staff can’t make it to a videoconference site, they can access live or archived webcasts. If you are hosting multiple site, multiple session road shows or sending staff to them, webcasting can provide a convenient alternative. Learners can choose when and where it is convenient to access content. Presenters can use archiving to avoid inefficient and repetitive events.
Let’s say a hospital or regional organization with multiple sites wants to leverage videoconferencing and webcasting to save costs and increase productivity next fiscal year. Here is a potential scenario for an OTN member organization:
- 5 regional sites with staff traveling to a hub for learning or meetings
- 3 staff at each regional site who attend by VC instead of driving
- 2 more staff who join by archived webcast when they have time
- 2 education events and 2 meetings per month excluding December and August.
The Cost Savings Calculator shows an annual savings of $38,450 for this organization. Over five years, that’s $192,250. What could your organization do with that?
Even if half of OTN’s roughly 2,200 members did this half as often, they would save $105 million over the next 5 years on travel and productivity. What could Ontario’s healthcare system do with that?
You may wish to consider sharing this with your leadership as they plan their budgets with increasingly sharpened pencils. Here’s a web page to help you calculate the worth of your Golden Goose – otn.ca/goldengoose
Allan Zahara
