How to Integrate Business Travel Into Your Office Culture
While business travel may be necessary for most modern corporations, it can cause stress or concern for employees — particularly if little notice is given beforehand. These trips often include long days, extended working hours, and multiple meetings or conferences. This can potentially damage your staff's motivation and wellbeing over time, which poses the risk of employee burnout.
So how can you avoid business travel becoming a nuisance?
The secret lies in well-integrated management for all work trips, helping employees feel valued for the effort they put in to help close new business deals and increase revenue. In this guide, we'll cover why business trips are necessary and the key to creating a structure within your office culture that means these trips should be celebrated rather than resented.
The importance of business travel in modern enterprises
Travel is often integral to a business's success. The most common reasons for work-related travel include contract signings, business pitches, and training opportunities — all crucial to business growth and client acquisition.
Travelling provides broad networking opportunities with people from all walks of life, opening up the prospect of meeting potential clients, investors, and suppliers. This benefits businesses on multiple levels, allowing you to position yourself as someone worth working with, learn from others, and identify areas for improvement within your company.
Additionally, travelling to face-to-face meetings with both new and existing clients offers a way to build rapport. Pitching your business in person is the best way to impress potential clients and demonstrate your willingness to put in the effort.
Assessing your current travel culture
It is essential to understand how your employees feel about your current business travel policies (if you have any) and gauge whether they think these trips are distributed fairly. To do this, it's crucial to provide a space for staff to share their opinions. Many employees often feel uncomfortable expressing unhappiness with aspects of their workplace culture — extending an anonymous survey across the organisation allows your team to speak their minds freely.
Once you have conducted your survey, break down and analyse the results to identify gaps that need to be addressed and improved upon. In many cases, minor tweaks will help to fine-tune your business travel policy. You can also compare your business travel policy against others in your industry to identify the benchmark for how most companies operate.
Strategies for integrating travel into office culture
While finding a solution that works for your business and employees can feel challenging, the value of successfully integrating business travel into your office culture cannot be overstated.
Collaborative Policy Development
As your employees are directly impacted by your travel policy, it’s crucial that they feel as though they are being heard by the business leaders and that their needs are being met. To do this, you are encouraged to involve your staff when creating your business travel policy.
Invite your employees to an open brainstorming session, where they can share ideas for the new policy. Once you have gathered ideas from team members, take them to an employee vote to determine which will be included in the final policy.
Create Inclusive Policies
Most businesses have a diverse workforce, including different genders, sexualities, ages, and backgrounds. As a result, travel policies should be mindful of this diversity and aim to be as inclusive as possible. Failure to create inclusive travel policies that factor in the comfort of all employees can make some employees dissatisfied and, in extreme cases, could even be considered discrimination.
Some examples of areas to consider include:
Safety: Do your employees feel safe sharing accommodation? If not, are there measures to ensure they can access their own room if needed?
Accessibility: Is your chosen mode of transport accessible for those with disabilities or old age?
Inclusivity: Are employees across all levels of the organisation able to attend trips?
Flexibility and Consideration
A flexible business travel policy is a great way to ensure employees feel supported and happy. All your employees have different home lives — some may commute long distances to work, while others may have young children that require childcare. Allowing flexibility in your travel itineraries can give employees some control over their transport arrangements and itinerary, making it easier to fit business trips into their work/life balance.
A flexible policy can also relieve some strain of travelling for work. Factors outside staff members' control, such as transport delays and weather events, can create tight deadlines and stacked itineraries. These can cause significant stress for employees, and running late can also make a wrong impression on your clients or shareholders. Flexible travel arrangements ensure your employees won't be forced to rush to meetings without downtime to decompress.
Communication and Education
Communication is critical to maintaining a fully integrated business travel plan. Once a business travel policy has been created, it's advisable to monitor it regularly to ensure it covers all business needs.
Keep your employees up to date with any changes to your travel policy, ensuring they can raise any concerns with new policies. This will help your employees feel that their input is being valued, and it will ensure that both the business and employees know what is expected of them when travelling for work.
Additionally, it's essential that all of your employees feel that they have an equal opportunity to go on business trips. This can be difficult, as there may only be a demand for employees of a specific level regarding client acquisition and meetings. This is why we recommend advertising that there is open availability for training trips — making your employees feel included and allowing them to learn new skills to aid in their professional development.
Incentives and Recognition
While travelling can provide excellent opportunities for employees to advance in their careers, frequent business trips for the same few employees could also come with the potential to build resentment and additional stress. If an employee feels that they are being taken advantage of or that other employees are not pulling their weight, this can become an issue and harm their workplace relationships. It's essential to monitor how many employees are going on trips for work purposes and reward them for their efforts.
Providing incentives to encourage employees who don't usually volunteer for work trips is another good way to help spread the responsibilities among your workforce and ensure that the burden isn't falling onto the same pair of shoulders each time. This can help to boost employee morale and encourages more involvement in work trips, relieving some pressure placed on employees who travel often for work.
Leveraging Technology
Business travel can involve lengthy and complicated administrative work, from filing expenses to booking transport for employees. This can take a significant amount of time and often adds stress for those responsible.
Technology can be a real advantage in easing the burden of admin, with numerous mobile applications allowing employees to easily log their expenses and book their travel within minutes.
Companies such as ExpenseIn and Zoho make it quick and easy to manage employee expenses, while managed transport solutions from experts like CMAC make scheduling business travel for your employees simple. This takes the pressure off your employees and transfers the responsibility for booking transport and accommodation to an external supplier — providing access to 24/7 support should anything go wrong.
Building a Supportive Environment
Your employees have much to manage during a business trip—from navigating between locations to preparing and delivering meeting materials. This can lead to deprioritising non-work essential tasks like eating and sleeping, significantly impacting your employees' health and mental well-being.
Ensure your employees are safe and taken care of when on a business trip. This includes checking in with them before, during, and after the trip to gauge whether they require additional support.
Some of the ways you can support your employees include:
Booking hotels with wellness centres, such as gyms and spas.
Providing fruit and vegetable snacks for employees to bring on the trip.
Designating a wellness representative to ensure employees are eating and drinking.
If your business conducts international work trips, jet lag is another threat that can impact your employees' ability to work. While jet lag isn't preventable, you can offset the worst of the effects by setting aside the day before and after flying for resting and recovery. This will show your staff that you value their well-being while allowing them to put their best foot forward during important meetings.
Business Travel Support You Can Trust
Planning inclusive business trips and prioritising employee wellbeing can be challenging, with so many factors to consider and control — from choosing suitable accommodation to rescheduling transport. Because this process is time-consuming, many corporations now outsource their business travel needs to an external company with the knowledge and expertise to find a suitable solution.
At CMAC, we pride ourselves in providing unrivalled corporate travel services to seamlessly move your employees from point A to point B without stress. We work with trusted suppliers to ensure that we can find the right vehicle for your every need. In addition, our high-demand accommodation partners have been the perfect solution for companies worldwide.
If you'd like to know more about our award-winning business travel solutions, get in touch with our customer service team today. We're open to enquiries 24/7, 7 days a week.