Fundamental to every managed program, corporate travel policies can do more than boss around employees. They reflect an organization’s culture and help balance cost control, risk mitigation, productivity and employee satisfaction. The task for managers is to keep them updated and relevant as traveler preferences and behaviors change and geopolitical and economic challenges pop up.
During the April Business Travel Executive Town Hall conducted via LinkedIn Live, a pair of corporate travel management veterans, Craig Banikowski and Nicole Del Sesto, discussed how to align policy with corporate priorities, what methods to use for employee communications and when to make updates.
If an organization plans to create or overhaul its travel policy, those responsible should understand financial needs, traveler demographics and current political and security considerations. Travel surveys can play an important role in bringing employees into the conversation and employee-friendly policies can be a helpful recruiting tool for HR, according to Craig Banikowski. The senior manager for global travel and meetings at Tyson Foods spoke a few weeks before transitioning to a travel management position with real estate firm CBRE.
“As I move into my next role, one of my initial steps will be reviewing what is out there,” said Banikowski. “Does it meet the needs? You can assess that through one-on-one meetings with key stakeholders, the CFO, department heads and road warriors. Also, for infrequent travelers, is the policy easy to understand and follow?”
Company culture helps frame how rigid a policy is. The use of designated booking channels and forms of payment are the most typical mandates, and sometimes the only ones. Many policy components are positioned as guidelines.
“There is a balance,” said Nicole Del Sesto, senior manager of travel at Applied Materials. “We’re very cognizant of the financials, but we want to be sure that these people who are on the road 300 days of the year are well supported in their endeavors. They are the heart and soul of our company. We wouldn’t have a company without them. You can’t just have a draconian financial policy. You have to balance out the comfort aspect,” she explained.
“We’ve tried to make our policy friendly enough that it is easy to follow and gives the travelers something that they want to follow,” Del Sesto said. Requiring the least expensive nonstop flights where possible reduces carbon emissions and lessens the risk of delays, lost luggage or other disruptions, though they’re often pricier than connecting itineraries. “These things are all connected,” she said. “We’ve got duty of care and we’ve got sustainability addressed in one policy.”
Tyson decided to bring together travel and expense policies. “It made it a little bit larger, but it answers a lot more questions in more of a compendium document,” Banikowski said.
Setting the Ground Rules
Some companies create differentiated policies based on the traveler’s trip purpose, department, seniority, position in the organizational hierarchy or other nuances. The travel managers warned of unintended consequences. Tiered policies mean more administrative work, and those based on the frequency of travel might invite abuse.
Similar to supplier loyalty programs, “If you say your road warriors can fly business class after X number of trips, then people are going to make sure they make X number of trips,” Del Sesto said. “You can always come up with a justifiable reason for a trip. Our policy is based on hierarchy.”
Senior executives may be the exception; sometimes situations warrant private jets, meet-and-greets, limos and personal security. “That’s, again, going back to the culture,” Banikowski said.
Both buyers made distinctions between policies and guidelines for processes and procedures. Fluid or short-term developments would be covered in the latter. “We really try to keep policy to things that should be policy-related: We’re not going to reimburse you if you use [an electric] scooter, and we suggest you don’t take a scooter,” Del Sesto said. “But if border patrol asks you for your device and you have to turn it over, that’s not going to be put into policy. That’s an educational thing.”
Banikowski looks at it the same way. “You don’t address things like politics in a policy, but I think there are some ways to communicate [current events] with our travelers,” he said. “If it’s not in a policy, maybe it’s more of a bulletin.”
That’s not to say the policies themselves shouldn’t be updated regularly. Del Sesto said she and her team made changes a couple dozen times in the past four years – largely based on traveler feedback – to keep policies “fresh” and streamlined with more concise language.
Communicating Changes
Both speakers said that spreading the word of any change could be challenging due to people’s tendency not to read. To overcome that, Del Sesto’s company turned to “Smart Brevity,” a book by Axios Media. “It has really changed the way that we communicate with travelers,” she said. “I was always telling this big, long story about why we did something. Now we start with the headline, whatever it might be, and we are communicating in fewer words with more punch and getting a lot of feedback about it.”
Banikowski also used an Axios tool to launch a newsletter, which he sends out seasonally, and issue targeted communiques to travelers and admins affected by, say, new visa rules for entering Brazil.
He expects artificial intelligence to assist in communicating travel policies. Banikowski has experimented with a policy chatbot and envisions similar tools embedded in self-booking systems. Travelers wouldn’t just see out-of-policy flags; they could ask why.
With an eye toward applying AI, Banikowski recently revised verbiage in company documentation. The somewhat unwieldy procedures document must include instructions on “how to travel without a credit card, direct billing, things like that,” he explained. “AI is going to really help revolutionize that. ‘How do I do this?’ Boom, it gives you an answer.”
To Travel or Not to Travel?
The most consequential policy may be the one governing decisions on whether to take the trip at all.
“We have a mantra around here: You save 100 percent of the cost of a trip you don’t take,” Del Sesto said. “It’s not necessarily about the cost, but more about: Does this trip need to happen at all? Are we risking the environment and the employees’ health and safety and time away from their family – and cost? Does that outweigh the benefit of the trip? When we did a big revision of our travel policy post-pandemic, we focused a lot on the fact that we learned to do business without business travel. We really encourage people to think before they book. Do I really need to go on this trip?”
This is where pre-trip approvals might come in. Every company has its own view on the approach, which ebbs and flows in popularity. Do those involved “keep up with their e-mails?” Banikowski warned. “If you’re going to have an approval process, everybody has to pay attention to it.”
