As the country starts to emerge from the economic doom and gloom, we are finding that many companies are emerging as stronger and more innovative as a result of the steps they have taken to reduce unnecessary expenditure and improve business efficiencies in the past year. One of our customers in the recruitment space is exemplifying this attitude and determination to change the way it does business.

By maximising its use of technology, 2009 Recruitment Company of the Year Morgan Hunt is making significant reductions to travel budgets and improving employee productivity, plus experiencing a host of unexpected Benefits for both employees and the business as a whole.

With a workforce dispersed across the UK and abroad, Morgan Hunt, the 2009 Recruitment Company of the Year, faced the headache of having staff frequently travelling between offices and to and from client sites for meetings.

The company was keen to explore ways it could reduce its annual travel budget by cutting out unnecessary travel, but this needed to happen without hampering employee productivity or reducing the number of valuable client interactions.

Morgan Hunt realised that by conducting more meetings remotely, on the web, they could save considerable time and money. But this strategy would only be successful if they could find a technology that was easy for both clients and staff to use, to maximise the number of remote meetings and ensure every one was productive.

With its simple interface, Morgan Hunt chose GoToMeeting to facilitate online collaboration and interaction among clients and employees. The product achieved incredibly fast adoption throughout the organisation and provided Morgan Hunt with the highest return on investment of any technology product in a decade, through a cost-efficient pricing model that allows as many meetings as you like for a flat monthly price.

By using the remote connectivity tools to save time, Morgan Hunt’s employees have been able to get more done to the tune of a six-figure staff productivity improvement in just six months.

Morgan Hunt’s workforce now uses GoToMeeting around eight times a week to collaborate and work with clients and colleagues, including their off-shore development team in the Asian sub-continent. That means no more complicated scheduling logistics, unnecessary time spent out of the office and money saved on travel expenses.

According to Gavin Megnauth, director of operations & group IT at Morgan Hunt, the ‘ease-of-use’ of GoToMeeting was the key differentiator over other solutions: “Because GoToMeeting is so easy to set up and use, the take-up by our staff has been incredible, especially compared to other technology solutions. Our less IT-literate staff are often apprehensive about using a new tool, but GoToMeeting has been adopted quickly and enthusiastically at all levels.

“Our use of GoToMeeting emphasises our determination to use technology that provides a new, sensible solution to age-old problems. This solution has had the quickest and biggest return on investment of any IT solutions we have implemented in the last decade and, in addition, it is environmentally sound.”

As the Morgan Hunt example demonstrates, canny businesses are looking to ditch their car in favour of a trend that we like to term web commuting – using online access and collaboration tools to work remotely, using the web, instead of travelling to face-to-face meetings.

But can meetings really be effective if we can’t make eye contact, or read the body language of the client, supplier or colleague that we’re talking to? Arguably, face-to-face contact can be vital in some scenarios, but online meetings are developing an etiquette of their own, allowing businesses to easily deliver sales presentations, conduct customer training sessions and streamline projects with remote teams.

Growing businesses, such as Morgan Hunt, are finding that using online meetings to communicate with customers, prospects and employees can actually be more productive than their real-world equivalent, enabling people to keep in touch quickly, easily, frequently and affordably.

It’s a trend that is set to outlive the recession, giving smart businesses the opportunity to avoid spiralling travel costs, enhance the productivity of staff, and increase competitiveness by supporting collaboration between business people based anywhere in the world.