You are in a leadership/management position with your firm, and you have been as

Question

You are in a leadership/management position with your firm, and you have been asked to support a major initiative to cut SG&A Costs across your organization. (SG&A: Selling, general, and administrative expenses are expenses incurred to run a company, such as salespersons' salaries and commissions, advertising and promotion, travel and entertainment, office payroll and expenses, and executives' salaries. These expenses are incurred to promote, sell, and deliver a company's products and services, and to manage the company, and generally not as a part of the production process.)

The CEO and the VP of Operations favor the idea of cutting the number of in-person meetings that your company holds each year. Your company has offices in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, with five managers in each city. The managers typically fly to a central location every two months to have an in-person meeting and review the business, go over scorecards, etc. Although the CEO is not a fan of virtual collaboration because it is generally second-best to meeting in person, he has mentioned the possibility of replacing a few of the in-person meetings with virtual sessions in order to save costs. Both the CEO and VP are known for being "tough to convince" because they require a substantial amount of data in support of any proposal.

a. What are some of the benefits to holding virtual meetings?

b. What are some types of virtual platforms that can be used to recreate the feeling of meeting in person?

c. How can you convince the CEO and VP to hold virtual meetings or are there better alternatives to pitch?

Explanation / Answer

a. The benefits of holding virtual meetings are

b. The types of platforms which we can use for virtual meetings are Webex,Skype, Lync, gotoWebinar, Zoho Meetings.

c.I will ask CEO and VP to try for virtual meetings on pilot basis and see costs saved. If the virtual meetings are affecting the decision making process of leadership, then I would recommend them to go for hybrid style of meeting where the limited crucial members, as per agenda, would travel and rest of the would join virtually. This will save the costs and would not affect the decision making process of leadership. I will ask them to execute both on trial basis and compare costs with past costs when people used to travel more frequently. The trials can be done for C level Leadership, VP Level leaderships and manager level leaderships to see where virtual meetings are actually saving the costs. Companies Like Accenture, IBM have tried it and have saved upto 60% on on-the-road costs (Source: NYTimes 22 July,2008)

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