Cultural signals

American Express Global Business Travel since 2021 has messaged that business travel had the potential to become the linchpin of modern company culture. The argument was that in a broadly diffused workforce – driven away from centralised corporate offices by the pandemic – travel itself could serve as the connective tissue that not only would bring people together but also could deliver a sense of purpose and serve as a critical touchpoint to corporate culture, collaboration and productivity. 

A report published last March in collaboration with cultural insights and strategy firm Cultique outlined five areas where the mega travel management company believed travel programmes would drive value in a remote-work world: company culture, personal wellbeing, professional development, employee empowerment and corporate values.

Fast-forward to 2023 and we're witnessing a push to bring workers back to the office – Amazon, Apple, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Salesforce, all included. Will this back-to-office mentality undermine the potential for travel to play a central cultural role in the organisation?

Amex GBT Meetings and Events global VP Linda McNairy posits that it’s not just offsite gatherings for remote workers that are changing the culture of travel; it’s travel’s position as a requirement and fabric of the corporation.

“Organisations are realising that as they ask employees to come back to the office, they are having to attract them there,” says McNairy. “Something similar is happening with travel. There was an older corporate culture of just accepting every policy: ‘It’s my employer, I have to do this’. Now people are saying, ‘I do have a voice in what matters to me,’ and organisations are listening. They acknowledge that travel can be part of that work-life trade-off that has become so important; that travel opportunities – and the personal and career development travel offers – can help balance out that back-to-office equation.”

Travel programmes as an extension of the workplace

According to BTN’s Traveller Experience Index survey, 83 per cent of travellers said business travel was “important” or “very important” to the success of their current jobs. And to McNairy’s point, 84 per cent of respondents said business travel was “important” or “very important” to their job satisfaction.

Given that overwhelming perception of travel’s value as an enabler of productivity and success, the idea that a travel programme serves as an extension of a supportive workplace isn’t a huge leap. As such, there’s an argument to be made that travel should integrate more seamlessly with human resources, technology and facilities management as departments that drive work enablement.

But many travel managers believe those aspects of their travel programmes don’t get as much play as they should – and neither do travellers themselves. Speaking at an event in the United States recently, one corporate travel and expense supervisor at a publicly traded corporation based confessed that travel policy and programme ownership at the 14,000-employee company had bounced around in recent years from procurement to finance and to a blend of the two before landing in its current position with executive sourcing, which the buyer indicated was still an awkward fit.

“It still feels like travellers are in the backseat; we need to get them top of mind – they need some visibility,” the travel buyer said. Other buyers in attendance identified with the lack of departmental ownership for travel strategy, and also bemoaned the reality that productivity enablement had not yet caught up with travellers’ actual needs.

Thinking beyond travel

Positioning a travel programme within corporate culture requires a bigger-picture lens than cost control. Rather than thinking about “business travellers” in vacuum, a corporate culture perspective forces travel stakeholders across all departments to consider travellers as employees first and understand their productivity needs – wherever they are. 

“[We need to] make sure employees have the best experience when they are working in our offices, travelling on behalf of the company or travelling to other offices,” says Takeda global head of travel, meetings, fleet and aviation Michelle DeCosta, whose bigger-picture lens is supported by a reporting structure that roles up into global real estate, facilities and procurement.

“Things like [having] a universal office security badge – no matter what office you go to, your badge works or can be turned on to work. Or, ensuring simple accommodations like multi-pronged electrical outlets in international offices can make travel for work just a little more productive,” she adds.

This holistic view of end-to-end employee enablement for what DeCosta described as Takeda’s “highly mobile” workplace has motivated new structures and technologies for the company’s travel programme, not just for facilities concerns.

“One of our internal key performance indicators this year was around improving the workplace experience for employees while they’re in the office or travelling. So it is something that’s always top of mind,” she says.

The company has transitioned over the past three years to a consolidated global programme with BCD Travel to equalize traveller service levels and provide data consistency for management, including traveller safety and duty of care. Aligning with its declared KPI, the company has put more emphasis on enriching the travel experience: first, by integrating traveller education and Takeda corporate values into the booking path and then extending that support system through the travel journey.

DeCosta has leaned into TripKicks, a self-described corporate travel experience enhancement provider available in SAP Concur’s App Center and within the BCD Travel Marketplace. The programme layer embeds detailed messaging at the point of sale that helps identify and recommend programme-preferred flights and hotels, and offers insights into the negotiated amenities the traveller will receive when booking them. TripKicks also supports traveller education on international travel documentation requirements as well as traveller safety and risk evaluations. It has a growing list of data partners that brings new information streams to the table.

Takeda, a Japanese company that promotes a culture of sustainability and wellbeing, uses TripKicks to promote sustainable travel choices. “It’s a layer in the booking tool that helps our travellers choose sustainable flights and hotels,” says DeCosta. TripKicks integrates flight emissions calculations at the point of sale that account for the type of aircraft and seat class to guide sustainable choices. It also focuses travellers on properties close to public transit and within walking distance of Takeda offices – a strategy that saves carbon as well as ground transportation costs. 

This ethos also rolls into workplace sites, which offer healthy catering choices to employee travellers along with onsite gyms. DeCosta has worked with Takeda’s wellbeing lead, who also reports through facilities, to produce a traveller tip sheet about staying healthy on the road. The Thrive corporate wellness programme promotes wellbeing and mental health to Takeda’s travelling population and beyond.

DeCosta added that Takeda’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts have included working with minority-owned suppliers, and the pharma company’s travel programme has customised TripKicks to include an icon for those options within the booking system as well. “I know we are the first company to use this,” she says. “I don’t know if it’s been rolled out to others.”

For guidance on the road, Takeda has invested in Emburse’s Roadmap app, a kind of app “envelope” that serves as a one-stop resource for numerous corporate travel functionalities.

“Within the app is everything a Takeda traveller needs to know, whether travelling to one of our offices or managing an itinerary to an offsite location,” says DeCosta. The app integrates itinerary data and information resources to deliver itinerary management and messaging that alerts travellers to current travel conditions along their route combined with customised messaging from Takeda to help facilitate in-policy journeys.

What travellers want: a policy analysis

From the standpoint of employee enablement and as a reflection of corporate culture and values, DeCosta’s programme at Takeda is among the elite. One might wonder what else travellers could want from a travel programme.

Amex GBT has attempted to figure that out in the context of travel policy strategy, as an evolution of last year’s collaborative report with Cultique.

The TMC last month published the results of a September and October 2022 survey collaboration with The Quorum that tested seven policy strategies – blended trips, personal travel extensions, personal amenities, supplier choice, supplier diversity, colleague recommendations and sustainability – with nearly 3,000 employees and more than 2,000 employers to understand what each group wanted from a travel policy perspective.

Sixty-one per cent of employee respondents said they want to bring family or significant others on blended trips, while 60 per cent want to add a personal trip to their business trip and 54 per cent want amenities to help recharge.

Employees were less concerned – but still interested – in more traditional travel programme fundamentals.

Forty-one per cent of employees said they saw the advantages of accessing a wider choice of suppliers on booking tools and 40 per cent wanted “more diverse suppliers” in the supply chain. Further down on the employee priority list, 28 per cent wanted a company channel to share travel tips with colleagues and 22 per cent want fewer but longer trips to help reduce carbon emissions.

Collaboration meetings

“I can tell you, definitely, that small meetings have had a huge comeback,” says HRS CEO Tobias Ragge, whose company handles hotel sourcing, booking and payment solutions, including a small meetings technology platform. “We have seen the numbers in this area going through the roof. Some of that is pent-up demand, but it’s also a function of the new remote-work reality.”

While companies may look to mitigate such meetings in a return-to-office environment, Ragge said he doesn’t see signs of a slowdown anytime soon.

Cultique co-founder Sarah Unger thinks a slowdown could be a mistake, anyway. Employees have come to value that offsite experience – when it’s done right. “People are so drawn to travel, but it has to be set up properly so it’s not always a grind.”

Collaboration meetings are more than an opportunity to sit 9-to-5 in a windowless room in heads-down meetings, she says. “Travel is an important connective tissue in a workplace that is hybridised or distributed. Travel activities at offsites [are now] structured to reflect more wellness and teambuilding. [There is more] drive and demand for dialogue-based meetings and interactions where you can really establish the personal connection between employees.”

While travel policies around blended or personal travel may not tie directly to company culture or values, they may position an organisation to recruit or retain employees, especially in high-demand industries and a tight labour market. When it comes to personal amenities or allowances that give travellers a chance to recharge while travelling, that is more common, likely because some of those perks and amenities can be negotiated into the buyer-supplier deal, says GoldSpring Consulting partner Neil Hammond.

Depending on the company’s overarching priorities – and, let’s face it, the travel buyer’s own compensation and incentive structures will influence the outcomes here – the travel buyer has room to “play with some of the value at stake,” within the travel programme says, Hammond. Those priorities determine “whether you put [negotiations] into direct cost savings or whether you’re going to put it into status matches and perks and other kind of things for travellers.”

To that end, reimbursable items will be the most convenient for travellers and the most cost-effective for organisations to negotiate when building the programme, says Hammond. As an example, making the case for amenities like airport lounge access for frequent travellers as a trade-off for meals purchased time and again at expensive airport locations. That begins to make business sense at a certain point; it’s the policymaker’s choice to figure out when and whether to consider the productivity standpoint of disruption mitigation against delivering on the trip objectives and enabling travellers to work comfortably amid in-transit challenges.

Hammond says company culture determines how far travel policy is willing to go in those areas, but there has been an overall shift in the tight labour market toward more flexibility, “giving [travellers] a little bit more license to do what they want.” 

That said, there are ways to create strong programmes with room for wellness and flexibility that empowers travellers.

“Sometimes, it’s the look and feel of how the policy is written, but also the content and the way it’s worded,” says Hammond. It’s often “reflected in how the policy enforcement part [is written] and how we’re making travellers comply.” Draconian rules or broad traveller concern over non-reimbursement when faced with an on-trip decision probably aren’t the best drivers of empowered corporate cultures.

Whatever level is right for the company, both employees and employers in the survey strongly agreed that moving toward more flexible, empowered travel policies that incorporate a clear awareness of a modern mobile workforce would make the company “a happier place to work,” “more competitive,” and financially “more successful,” according to the Amex GBT-Quorum survey.

Sending the right signals

It’s easier said than done, though. Aligning with corporate culture and driving employee experience through the travel programme can be an all-hands-on-deck situation, involving everyone from the executive level down.

But Cultique co-founder Linda Ong told BTN, “Corporate travel managers have a much more critical role in the organisation than just being people who manage expenses. They really can set the policies that can affect the internal culture of a company.”

How companies deliver the culture, policy and enablement message to travellers matters just as much as setting and implementing those programme foundations in the first place.

Embedding the policy and messaging into travel technologies and processes certainly is the most ideal, but not every travel programme will have the latitude or investment dollars to digitise that experience. There are plenty of other ways, including partnerships with HR and positioning the travel programme as a benefit in the employee onboarding process – with the caveat, naturally, that the benefits all come to those employees who comply with policies and processes.

Perhaps the most visible signal of corporate culture – and the value the travel programme brings to those who use it – is the prominent example set by organisational leaders, says Cultique co-founder Sarah Unger. Especially when it comes to driving cultural change within the travel programme and encouraging employees to use the benefits that are being provided.

“Senior employees or managers [need to] set a precedent saying, ‘It’s OK to use this policy that we set in place for everybody’s wellbeing’ by walking the walk or modeling strong behavior in company culture,” she says. “Normalising things really goes far in helping people actually adopt them, because you don’t want to create a travel benefit that no one knows about or people feel uncomfortable using because they don’t see it in action.”

Indeed, to offer a travel benefit that no one is able to use begs the question of whether the travel programme is conveying company culture – or just a cultural myth.