Real-time communications tools speed the pace of communication and boost productivity while delivering hard dollar savings.

By Patricia Schnaidt
May 2005

Brainstorming sessions around the water cooler are a relic of the pre-Internet age. Today, 90 percent of employees work outside of their company’s headquarters and one-third work in locations away from their managers and the workers they interact with on a daily basis, according to Nemertes Research.

Whether employees are working from branch offices, from home or with partners halfway across the world, it’s becoming more important to efficiently close the gap of distance. E-mail freed us from phone tag, but with e-mail boxes reaching epic proportions, it’s clear that it’s getting harder to work together productively....

“Real-time communications have a concrete ROI,” says Melanie Turek, Senior Vice President at Nemertes Research and author of the study, “The Virtual Workplace: Leveraging Real-Time communications in the Enterprise,” which was released in January. Significant hard dollar savings for virtual and remote workers is rooted in reducing the cost of facilities, employee relocation and travel.