Phone meeting or conference calls now took the place of face to face or direct meetings in case of some companies but the status remains the same in many other ones. In the current environmental situation we are trying to decrease their climate effect. One way can be to reduce the amount of travels by increasing the usage of distance meetings.

Other advantages distance technology brings are the cost and time savings that comes when the employees of the organization do not have to travel. There are no flight tickets, hotels or other travel expenses. The staff is more effective since they do not have to spend time waiting after checking in at the airport and they do not have to wait for their luggage or get stuck in a traffic jam to or from the airport. With all of these advantages one would think that most organizations would be willing to use this technology.

This is however not the case. The usage today varies between heavy users to reluctant users. In an attempt to find differences between heavy and light users of distance technology four out of 12 county councils in Sweden have been studied. In each of the county councils two interviews have been performed, one with the management and one with an average user of distance technology. The interviews showed that there are only a few things that differ between the frequent users and the less frequent users. One of the significant differences are the availability of support, the heavy users have easy access to support in case the user experiences problems whereas the light users have trouble to get assistance.

The education of the users are another thing that are different between the groups, the organizations with high usage have well educated users at the same time as the light users are less educated on the usage of the technology. When looking at the process of setting up a distance meeting there are differences between the groups, the high users have a process that is similar to the process of setting up a regular meeting, the light users have a more complex process when using distance technology compared to regular meetings.

The last difference is when distance meetings are considered to be an alternative as to how to hold the meeting. The light users have some cases when distance technology is excluded as an alternative whereas the heavy users always consider distance meetings as an alternative instead of travels. Even though Phone Meetings are helping people to cut short their expenses many are not making utilization of them.