It may seem out of a travel buyer's remit, says Amon Cohen, but looking after employees’ physical wellbeing can bring wider benefits
IT DID NOT EXACTLY constitute forensic statistical analysis, but the answers were revealing nonetheless. At the Institute of Travel & Meetings (ITM) annual conference in May, I asked various travel buyers whether they concern themselves with the physical and mental health of their travellers. The answers, unanimously, were negative.
“I’m not surprised,” says Susan Lancaster, director of client management for HRG. “Travel managers don’t see themselves as responsible for traveller health, but rather for issues like tracking compliance with policy.”
But why? Travel managers have long involved themselves in fulfilling their organisations’ duty of care to travellers, yet only in the sense of managing their security and safety. Health issues rarely merit a mention, even though they are far more likely to afflict frequent travellers than terrorist attacks or hotel fires. A combination of jetlag, early days, poor cabin air quality, patchy sleep, over-eating and under-exercising make regular business travel one of the least healthy lifestyles imaginable for a white-collar worker.
“If you put all those factors together, it is a toxic situation,” says Tracey Randell, who runs a nutritional consultancy service called Healthy Aspirations. And as a former travel manager for the mass media company Viacom, she is someone who understands traveller health better than most.
Despite the reaction at the ITM conference, some companies are waking up to the issue. Lancaster quotes examples of policy changes by two major clients this year to illustrate the point. The first was a large manufacturing concern, which made business class mandatory for all flights over seven hours – even though HRG forecast the upgrade would increase the client’s travel costs by 25 per cent.
The second example was a bank that reversed a nine-month-old decision to move the minimum flight duration for business class from six hours to eight hours, thus restoring New York as a premium cabin destination. It followed what Lancaster describes as “noises within the business” about the impact on travellers. The same concern, she believes, explains why more companies have not downgraded during the recent double-dip in the long-term global recession. “The renewed focus on reducing cost means we are frequently asked to analyse the savings clients could achieve through policy downgrades,” she says. “Yet out of every 10 clients we do the work for, eight won’t go ahead with it. When it goes to the board for final sign-off, the message comes back down that the benefit to the business is not worth the risk to the employee.”
The key word in Lancaster’s comment is “risk”. The growing fear of reputational damage and legal liability is one of two principal reasons why traveller health seems belatedly to be appearing on some corporate agendas. The second is that more businesses are making a connection between health and productivity. In the immediate term, that means ensuring travellers are not exhausted before they even start work. “Company executives are the elite athletes of their companies and need to perform as soon as they land,” says Randell.
Perhaps even more importantly, businesses are realising corporate travel takes its toll in the longer term, too. “We see stress as the enemy of productivity,” says Vincent Lebunetel,
EMEA senior director for Solutions Group, the consulting division of Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT). According to Lebunetel, the United Nations has defined work-related stress as epidemic, with resultant lost productivity accounting for 3-4 per cent of global domestic product.
Given that travel has great potential to be stressful, companies need to find ways of minimising those elements of trips that tax employees the most. “Travellers should only be worried about their work, not the travel,” Lebunetel says. “Saving money does not necessarily mean increased profitability.”
Lebunetel’s comment pinpoints exactly why health is such a tricky issue for travel buyers, and why initiatives to manage it generally originate elsewhere in the organisation, such as human resources. Travel managers are often incentivised to save travel costs for their company, yet paradoxically those very savings could potentially damage the productivity and, therefore, profitability of the company. Seeing the bigger picture about productivity means travel managers need to think wider, working with human resources or corporate social responsibility managers. In return, companies need to do right by their travel managers and ensure evaluations of success in their job are not based solely on pounds and pence.
“A travel programme cannot just be about saving direct travel costs,” says Bernard Harrop, global head of sustainability for Project Icarus, part of the
GBTA Foundation. In co-operation with the business psychology consultancy Robertson Cooper, Harrop put 300 frequent travellers from the same company through a psychological stress testing assessment, recognised by the Health and Safety Executive. The assessment revealed the frequent travellers were typically in the bottom 25 per cent of the productivity range for management professionals. They were 9 per cent less productive per £100,000 of salary than those who did not travel frequently.
Better policy decisions
Clearly, travel buyers cannot fix the situation by allowing all travellers to fly in private jets and stay in five-star hotels. Luckily, Lebunetel thinks they can be smarter than that. Examples include ensuring preferred hotels are close to where travellers need to be (such as the local company office), or dropping any obligation to take cheaper indirect flights when a direct option is available. “Making better policy decisions for travellers does not mean moving everyone from economy to business class,” he says. “If we discover that flying direct increases costs 10 per cent, but leads to better productivity, then that is worth doing.” CWT is following this thinking by developing a Stress Index, which will attempt to quantify the extent to which a client’s travel policy is distressing its travellers, and the productivity improvements that could be gained by adjusting it. Lebunetel hopes to have the index ready next year.
There are many other ways travel managers can help. How about, for example, throwing out most of the travel policy altogether? Google is famous for a radically pared-down policy which gives employees carte blanche to decide who and how they book, provided it is within prescribed price caps. The company’s travel and expenses manager, Mike Tangney, is convinced this freedom contributes substantially to traveller wellbeing.
Equally important, he believes, is finding ways to help avoid travel completely, surely the best way of all to improve traveller health. “Flexibility in terms of need to travel, flight times and carriers all reduce the stress of travel,” he says. “Each individual has their own needs and circumstances, and should have control of their travel plans, too – the travel manager can’t have all the answers. The parent wanting shorter trips versus the new graduate wanting to stay an extra few days to experience a city are two sides of the same coin. Allowing flexibility, especially when it is still reasonable and in budget, makes a big difference to the individual.”
A different approach
If companies want to improve work-life balance by helping employees avoid travel, then they must offer electronic communications alternatives, which is exactly what telecoms and technology company Analysys Mason has done. “We have just invested in a video-conferencing set with a 52-inch screen for our boardroom,” says executive assistant Karen Westdijk. “This has been particularly invaluable for a large project we have been working on in Brazil. We can now undertake detailed discussions on the regular basis that the project needs, with far fewer long trips away for our team.”
Even more drastic than giving employees the option not to travel would be ordering them to stop, or at least limiting how many trips they take. Healthy Aspirations’ Randell, who was recently hired to advise a leisure company which lost a senior manager for four months to adrenal fatigue, believes this is something businesses should give serious consideration to. “Travel managers could run a report on how many trips their top 50 travellers take, especially for internal meetings, and flag it to management,” she says. Even if trip numbers are not curbed, she argues, it might at least be possible to take mitigating action, such as allowing a day off after long-haul trips.
Ideas such as grounding frequent travellers might sound radical for all parties concerned, but ultimately intervening in health issues should reaffirm the strategic, cross-functional importance of the travel buyer, believes Miriam Moscovici, senior director, emerging technologies for BCD Travel. “Once again, the travel programme has an opportunity to support wider corporate goals, in this case meeting duty of care obligations and reducing healthcare costs,” she says. Healthy travellers could be a healthy opportunity for travel managers.
FIGHTING FIT: HOW TRAVEL BUYERS CAN INFLUENCE TRAVELLER DIET AND EXERCISE
Re-think your preferred hotel programme
Make provision of fitness centres and swimming pools a key criterion in your choice of preferred properties. Negotiate complimentary use of the facilities if not free to guests. If that is not possible, make the fees reimbursable to your travellers.
Negotiate deals with gyms
Negotiate preferential rates with national gym chains or individual gyms near frequently used hotels lacking their own fitness facilities.
Check benefits offered by your company’s health insurer
Insurers often offer a package of fitness benefits, such as 24-hour telephone access to medical counselling, but employees may well be unaware of them. Make sure you promote them internally.
Promote hotel-room workouts
Numerous websites and YouTube videos, not to mention DVDs, feature exercise routines which travellers can follow in their bedrooms. Run any recommendations past your company’s wellness expert first to review for safety.
Encourage a good night’s sleep
Adequate sleep is crucial for good health, but that can prove a challenge in unfamiliar rooms. Remind travellers to take a sleep mask, or issue them with one. You can also suggest they try white noise apps, which help some people nod off.
Provide access to health-promoting apps or Web links
Examples include the Eat This, Not That! app.
Research running options
Remind travellers to check with their hotel concierge for route recommendations. Alternatively, the Map My Walk app uses mobile phone-based GPS to allow users to search Google maps or use its own walking-route planner. Promote self-help through social media Ask runners among your travellers to post their favourite routes on Map My Walk and link to them on your internal social network. Encourage discussions about the best places to find healthy meals in frequently-visited cities.
Source: BCD Travel