Meeting Online to Reduce Carbon Emissions and to Emphasise Values in Life and at Work

In today’s media, we often read about how much energy digital services consume, with streaming services, such as Netflix, and social media hosting, such as Facebook, in the spotlight. Though these are certainly serious issues that we as a society must address, there are also opportunities for using digital and online technologies to help organisations respond to the sustainability imperative by reducing their carbon footprints. For example, as researchers working with online leadership, collaboration and learning, we often hear organisations address the need for meeting online from a cost-effective perspective, such as reducing travelling costs, reducing time spent on meetings and reducing the necessary preparation time. Though we do not generally disagree with this practice, we find that a similar perspective regarding environmental issues could prove beneficial, shifting the focus from a time and cost-effective ideal to a new value-driven perspective on life and work. Thus, the questions become how can we use digital services, such as online video conferencing, to yield meaningful results for the organisation and the environment and how can we create organisational incentives to identify and apply these online alternatives to benefit the organisation and society at large. This may also provide a new set of dynamics for motivating employees, students and others to partake in such digitalisation strategies if they are associated with concern for the environment. In this paper, we address in more detail the arguments for a sustainability perspective to online leadership, collaboration and learning rooted in the literature and the daily news, and we discuss cases from our own settings to provide suggestions for working with the positively charged concept of Environmental Conversion Value; however, this remains a complex arena with multiple considerations and concerns.