3 Takeaways
- Travel policy should be traveler-focused as opposed to cost-focused to increase employee productivity, loyalty and retention.
- Knowing where and when employees are traveling helps HR with duty of care.
- A dialogue between departments can help HR better understand travel policies and even communicate them to employees.
It might seem like travel and human resource departments are natural allies. And they are—when there is ongoing, direct communication between the two departments beyond the usual setting up of traveler profiles and onboarding of new employees. By working together and sharing information, they can collaborate on traveler satisfaction—which for HR translates to employee satisfaction. They can also improve traveler wellness, ensure duty of care and help improve retention rates. HR can help prepare the travel department for large initiatives, such as an expansion or a round of layoffs.
"The travel department is a business enabler," said Harmony Miller, who recently transitioned from a senior HR analyst role at ZGF Architects to HR manager and office administrator at GRI, an engineering consulting firm. She also headed up travel at ZGF and will do the same at GRI. "People are spending time away from their lives for your business, and if you treat [travel] as just a cost center, eventually those employees will treat your business as just a job. Ignoring that for any company that is investing in developing and retaining talent is a huge risk."
Most sources BTN spoke to agreed that having a traveler-focused travel policy versus a cost-focused one was more beneficial for both employees and the company. Miller said that one way to get more out of a travel program without spending additional money is for the travel manager to talk to the HR department. "The travel manager is already collecting reams of data—who is traveling, how often are they traveling, what level they are at—they can take that and triangulate it with information HR has about the employee population, like whether they're experiencing high turnover, and "make sure everything you are doing serves the employee well, which [in turn] will serve the business well."
As logical as that sounds, a BCD Travel report released in July showed that only 31 percent of travel buyers said they often or very often interact with HR colleagues. That means more than two-thirds have only occasional or rare to no contact with the HR department, which leaves a lot of opportunity on the table for positive business outcomes.
Safety & Security
HR & Travel Can Partner to Reduce Road Warrior Friction
A key element that marries travel and human resources is traveler well-being. It's important for HR to understand who is where, when and how often in order to assess and mitigate traveler friction, which essentially is when a road warrior is burned out from too much travel, or too much uncomfortable travel.
"Even if every trip goes smoothly, each trip adds to accumulated traveler friction, your wear and tear of travel," said Scott Gillespie, head of analytics for Airlines Reporting Corp. and CEO of tClara. There's air, hotel, ground, meals, self-booking, reimbursements, "the whole travel ribbon has friction points embedded throughout it. At some place, you will be less likely to want to travel. Or maybe you don't want to travel this way the company is asking you to travel. But if a different company offered a better travel policy and that was essential to your job, that could be a decision and retention issue."
A soon-to-be-released study from ARC and Visa surveyed 186 senior executives who own travel budgets, and when asked if they were to make a recommendation to their firm's CEO and board about their company's travel priorities, nearly one third (32 percent) said retaining more of their frequent travelers would be their single most important issue. Nine percent cited improving their frequent traveler's health and safety.
Some suppliers, such as American Express Global Business Travel, have started offering a traveler well-being dashboard that gives scores to companies and benchmarks them against their peers. Others, like air price assurance provider FairFly, can score individual departments and travelers.
Asked about traveler well-being at BTN's recent Innovate conference, panelist Pam Massey, deputy director mobility and travel at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said it was "absolutely on the list for 2020 as a priority. Talent is a commodity, and it's hard to get talent. … We are a data driven organization. How [does a traveler] indicate to their manager in concrete terms ‘I am tired.' You could take data [like] how many times have they taken a red eye? How many times have they sat in economy? How many times have they traveled over the weekend? How many times have they done so many hours of flights under a certain time period? We want to do this in an easy, dynamic way so it becomes a conversation and becomes part of the DNA of the organization to say, ‘I'm too hot, I need to not go on that trip and this is an indicator of why.'"
Policy Provisions
"HR must partner with any business function that impacts the employee experience to ensure that together we strike the balance between business needs and the expectations of the talent on our team," said Bill Valle, a former HR head for global software, automobile and electronics companies. Especially in a tight labor market, travel policies can be a big influence on high-value employees.
HR owns travel at Allison Transmission and the department writes and manages the travel policy. The company recognizes travel can take a toll. Benefits include bonus paid time off for employees who travel on weekends, and when someone needs to fly internationally, they go in business class. "If we have a nursing mom who needs to travel for work, for example, we will [reimburse the expense of shipping the] milk back so traveling doesn't have to impact that part of her life," Hoffman said. "Those things are well received by employees."
It's important to Allison that traveler satisfaction is high, agreed Amanda Harmeyer, program management specialist in HR who is also the company's travel manager. "Whether we give them an upgraded seat, or extend their trip for leisure, it's the little things like that that play into the role of overall satisfaction of the traveler," she said.
At ZGF Architects, Harmony Miller, who recently left her role as senior HR analyst, zeroed in on same-day travel to determine work-life balance issues. "Let the employee inform a little more about their travel schedule rather than just being dispatched to a meeting and having someone else book their trip and not ask for their input," Miller said. Maybe employee performance would benefit from a previous night stay or has the employee driven the decision to return on the same day for personal reasons? "If HR doesn't have anything to do with the travel program, checking in regularly with the people who do manage travel can do a lot for the traveler experience and morale."
Employee duty of care is a major aspect of HR's stake in the travel program. HR wants to be aware of who is traveling, where and when, and ideally plays a role in ensuring travelers are safe. But the two departments can work together to enhance safety and security in other ways.
For Allison Transmission, an Indianapolis-based manufacturer of automatic transmissions and electric hybrid propulsion systems, the travel department and the medical department both report to HR. "Anyone who travels has to go through an annual travel exam," said Allison's VP of human resources Mary Anne Hoffman. If someone had a recent surgery, the company wants to make sure doctors clear them, especially if they are traveling internationally. They can also make sure the employees are current with vaccinations. "Because we own both travel and medical, it makes it easier than if they weren't under HR."
Increased Productivity
No company wants to spend their time and money on travel for the sake of travel, which means employees on the road need to be as productive as they are in the office. "Productivity is as important as security, and even more so than cost savings," Miller said. "This is where I think companies can be penny wise and pound foolish."
It's not that spend isn't important—any travel manager will tell you the bottom line still matters—but in the granular view it can get skewed and a company might cut back and damage the productivity of an employee who just wants to get their job done.
Bill Valle, a former HR head for global software, automobile and electronics companies, once found himself as the middle person between headquarters and the local subsidiary, negotiating changes to the travel policies and practices. "Many of my people were professionals who traveled globally, and I had to make sure they were satisfied," he said. The company didn't want to pay for Wi-Fi on flights, but employees were traveling long distances. He negotiated with headquarters to give employees the choice to use Wi-Fi and know it could be expensed. It seemed like a straightforward call, but employee enablement had gotten lost in a cost-cutting exercise.
Onboard Wi-Fi is a policy decision; other enablers could require additional sourcing or work with suppliers to enhance benefits. Miller's department at ZGF, for example, made sure travelers booked partner hotels in close proximity to the company's projects to reduce commuting time on location. It also included nicer hotels in the program with better benefits than what might be offered by other companies for the same level and type of projects. "That's one area I think HR can really use in recruitment and retention," she said.
An HR perspective might also push the travel department to look outside its immediate remit for solutions to mobile productivity. Consider the IT solutions frequent travelers need to stay connected to the office and access the files and systems they require to conduct business. Are road warriors equipped with powerful laptops and mobile devices that non-traveling employees may not need? And does the company consider utilization issues for travelers when making enterprise purchasing decisions? "If you are spending for software that will increase [overall] employee productivity, you have to make sure those tools also work for your travelers to boost their productivity," Miller said.
Cost Savings Still Important, But So Is Value
Travel metrics are critical for Allison's Hoffman. "We get reports regularly about our travel spend and we do a lot of analysis around it," she said. "I'm a big believer that what gets measured gets changed, so when we're able to see what is going on, that is critical for our decision-making process."
Allison works with travel management company Fox World Travel, which provides weekly, monthly and quarterly reports. On a weekly basis, HR looks at who is booked for future travel and whether it's international or not, because international flights are in business class. "If someone leaves the company, we want to know if there is a ticket out there we can reutilize," Hoffman said.
Monthly reports cover overall spend for air, hotel and car. Quarterly, the company's key supplier partners meet on site for a deep dive into metrics: 14-day advance bookings, percent of bookings made outside the managed channel, compliance to preferred vendors. Sometimes a new market will surface where Allison doesn't have negotiated rates. The company will reach out to vendors that serve that location.
For Miller, being cost conscious was important at ZGF, especially as some of her travelers were going to expensive metro areas and had spending caps for government contracts. Her own approach to reviewing costs was more about maximizing value. "We had hotel program feedback from our TMC and from travelers," she said, but Miller's HR concern was in identifying how ZGF's hotel program benchmarked to competitive firms. "When we got a new TMC, the goal was to increase the value we were getting for what we were spending."
Sometimes, the value conversation can get tricky between travel and HR. Valle consistently challenged travel management about why an employee would find a good fare, but the travel department would instead insist that the traveler buy a higher fare to fulfill a contract or reach certain minimum volumes. "It goes counter to telling people to make their best judgement; they do, and then you tell them they can't take that flight," he said. "It happens too often."
Having better communications between the two departments could help each understand the others' decisions. "Leaders of each team need to get together and agree to be a unified organization," Valle said. "That means they'll meet and talk about what works and what doesn't and how they set up communication patterns and then figure out together how to improve the [programs]."
Room for Improvement
According to BCD's report, 60 percent of travel managers do not share data with HR. When shared, it's most frequently related to policy compliance, bookings, travel spend and traveler satisfaction. "Sharing data gets the conversation started," said Miriam Moscovici, senior director of innovation and research at BCD Travel. "[The data] might indicate some issue with employees and how to improve the policy to improve wellness and retention."
But travel managers also need to ask HR to start gathering data that could be valuable to them, such as asking HR to count or document how often the travel policy comes up when talking to candidates or employees. Ask them to add a question about the travel policy to exit interviews and to employee satisfaction surveys.
"Most enterprise companies are beginning to deploy employee satisfaction strategies, and if you already have a survey methodology, ask if the travel program is represented," Moscovici said. "If not, [a travel manager] should be able to demonstrate why it should be. It's a critical component of employment, and while not everyone in a company travels, if we could link [employee] satisfaction and overall happiness with the company and success and productivity and ask them about their travel experiences as well, that's very useful. We know business travel is a huge component of a company's ability to compete and win."