Benefits of Teleworking

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Dave Lucas: Teleworking is becoming more common for many professionals but the advantages are not limited to just reducing carbon emissions from driving to work daily. Rick Snyder is the President of TANDBERG and he joins us live in the studio now with more on how teleworking can be an important tool for business and it's great to have you here.

Rick Snyder: Pleasure to be here.

Dave Lucas: Thank you very much for joining us. Couple of things about teleworking. We know the advantages of it, supposedly for the employer and the employee but we have to view this through the lens sort of current events. We are hearing an awful lot of about swine flu now and it's not just enough that teleworking is potentially good for the environment, getting cars off the road. We may have no choice but to telework because we can't go to work, too many people are sick.

Rick Snyder: Sure, great example of that was recently in Mexico, just 60 days ago swine flu breakout there was more prominent. And in our case, our General Manager there, Rafael was able to actually conduct business via video conferencing with his employees, with his partners without leaving his home. So it's a powerful benefit there, one of our partners, Dimension Data, same thing at 30 some odd employees who actually continued doing business even though the outbreak was obviously fairly impactful.

Dave Lucas: So managers have to think about you know maybe more than just -- this is something we would like to do. They may have no choice.

Rick Snyder: They may have no choice. In fact, we are seeing organizations across the globe look at telework as a powerful business continuity application, right? We have been the outbreak with the swine flu, we have had the bird flu, we have had natural disasters like Katrina and video conferencing because it's very visual in nature, high impact form of communication allows business to continue to be conducted, employees to stay connected with their teams, but also employees to stay connected with their families.

Dave Lucas: Is this maybe one of those sort the (inaudible) unintended consequences kind of thing, is this a tipping point that maybe some businesses that up until this point hadn't really thought much about the idea of teleworking are going to look at this in a different way and say this really does have advantages for us.

Rick Snyder: Well, it's one of the number of factors. I mean if you look at what's happening, video conferencing and telepresence is a productivity driver in and out of itself. So there are transformational business benefits to it, there is a cost benefit because if you have video conferencing, you are not jumping on a plane to go someplace and then there is obviously a green benefit. Add in there telework as a variable and the fact that there is a work life balance issue and the fact that employees want to actually have a great lifestyle and work hard as well but also you add in the natural disaster and the business continuity elements, it obviously is another major factor driving the growth of telework but also video conferencing and telepresence technology.

Dave Lucas: Yes, that's a very good point to make. Rick Snyder is the President of TANDBERG, Americas and thank you so much for joining us.

Rick Snyder: My pleasure, Dave. Thank you.