The Clash lead guitarist Mick Jones probably didn’t have post-viral, sustainability-conscious corporate travel in mind when he penned the four-chord classic Should I Stay Or Should I Go? nearly four decades ago. Nevertheless, establishing some principles to help employees answer the question posed in the song’s title has arguably become the dominant quest in travel management 2021-style.
For the past couple of years, Stay has muscled itself firmly on top in the perpetual Stay/Go arm-wrestle. Growing awareness of environmental cost was already combining with financial cost as an inhibitor of travel, and then along came Covid.
While the virus continues to make every trip more hazardous and complicated than pre-pandemic, guidance for travellers is essential, Business Travel Show Europe’s pre-event conference was told last month by Caroline Strachan, managing partner of the consultancy Festive Road.
“In the absence of rules, people will make up their own,” Strachan warned. “You have to create a framework. But don’t turn it into a 20-page checklist to make yourself feel better as a travel manager.”
Yet the underlying case for Go persists, otherwise companies would never invest, in some cases, nine-figure sums annually in their employees criss-crossing the globe.
What is the correct balance? The following day at the show itself, BP global category manager for travel and meetings Richard Eades participated in a panel discussion on whether travel management is morphing into interaction management. Eades revealed his team is working on tools to help travellers determine “should this activity be travel, should it be hybrid or should it be virtual? That’s the process we’re creating at the moment so people can make informed decisions, and bring sustainability into the transactional area instead of reporting after you’ve held the meeting.”
In the same session, Scott Gillespie, managing director of the consultancy tClara, stated six principles to help businesses decide whether a trip is justifiable:
• Travel must lead to more value than it costs.
• Trips don’t create value; meetings do. Focus first on making the meeting successful.
• Meeting success, traveller wellbeing and sustainability must take priority over cost and savings.
• Justifiable travel is best done with travellers and suppliers committed to improving travel’s sustainability.
• Travel budgets are best used for higher-value trips. So redesign travel programmes and budgets around this premise.
• Senior management must learn to recognise the signs of too little and too much travel.
Gillespie was very keen to stress that while his principles can inform Stay/Go decision making, no one can “assess the expected value of the trip. It’s a long walk under a hot sun,” he said. “It can’t be done – it’s a fool’s errand. It always comes down to management judgment.
“What we do need,” he continued, “is a more rigorous and objective approach to weighing the obvious inputs into making that decision: Why are we travelling? Have we met these people before? How much opportunity is there to create value? Those are the inputs managers will want to take on board before making that decision.”
Gillespie delivered a second verbal broadside at another assumption sometimes articulated about business travel: that one large swathe of interactions, namely internal meetings, does not need to happen face-to-face and therefore travel to meet colleagues is often unjustifiable.
“It is an incredibly foolish premise to believe that only client travel should be justified over internal travel,” Gillespie declared. “If you believe that, then your organisation should absolutely sell off all its office spaces. The only reason we have office spaces is that we believe there is value in having people work close together. It’s like saying ‘we can’t justify a trip that’s designed to create innovation or foster leadership or trust or teamwork or accountability.’ It’s beyond silly.
“I really hope travel managers can do a better job of advocating for travel for internal purposes because it clearly has value and oftentimes will outweigh the trivial trip to [a customer] where there is very little revenue opportunity.”
Conversely, Institute of Travel Management chief executive officer Scott Davies believes the unsought “zero travel” experiment imposed by the pandemic has established that certain interactions essential to business cannot be achieved virtually. These are: networking and building relationships; any kind of selling or development where there is a need to understand people and their challenges; the launch of new internal strategies; and strengthening company culture.
It is at this point that Go’s arm starts to lift off the table and move back into some sort of equilibrium with Stay. Louise Kilgannon, a consultant with Festive Road, recommends companies ask themselves how “not travelling for 18 months has affected results. If you can’t travel, what are the business impacts? Having dialogue with stakeholders across the business is really important. Perhaps what you will find is that you can cut travel in some areas but need to increase it in others.”
It was to this end that earlier this year Festive Road launched its Purposeful Travel Model. The model is a framework for travel managers to develop the conversations with senior management and budget holders advocated by Gillespie for making balanced judgments on travelling or otherwise.
“You’re not going to get a magic formula of ‘this is what we get if we dial down’,” says Kilgannon. “But you can go to the leadership to say which interactions are a reasonable use of travel and which can be done by Zoom.”
The good news for travel managers is that, whether called Justifiable or Purposeful Travel, initiating this kind of dialogue can potentially enhance their value even if their business is travelling less than pre-pandemic. “You are positioning yourself as a strategic adviser who can engage with internal stakeholders,” says Kilgannon.
Gillespie made precisely the same point at BTS Europe. “So much of this is a great opportunity for travel managers to initiate deeper, more meaningful conversations with senior management,” he said.
Perhaps a 40-year-old brilliant-but-dumb punk anthem is smarter than first it looks.
Next time: Travel’s role in the rethink of workplace collaboration