Since the outbreak of COVID-19, 2022 is the closest we have been to a normal year without travel restrictions and mass panic. Everyone is still cautious though, but this year is already shaping up to be a busy year for corporate travel. Having had most of their employees work from home for several months, companies are now requesting that their workers return to the offices and that business activities return to usual.
Amidst these changes, business leaders must examine their company’s current situation and determine if employees are ready to travel again as well as how to create renewed corporate travel policies. As you already know, there are several important factors to consider in making such important decisions. We have summarised the major considerations into three succinct points, with a focus on employees, programmes, and processes.
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There is no determining that your company is ready for corporate travel again unless your employees express their willingness to embark on such trips. And according to the Global Business Travel Association’s (GBTA) Business Travel Recovery Poll, 93% of travel managers report that their company’s employees are willing to embark on corporate travel.
However, beyond willingness, it is also highly important to equip your employees for such trips before your company can claim full readiness for post-COVID corporate travel. According to the GBTA Poll, a good ratio of the corporate travel leaders examined conceded that many employees are confused about travel restrictions posed by the pandemic (63%), generally experience stress and anxiety about travel (45%), and have challenges navigating airport and security rules (36%).
To help business travellers overcome these challenges and properly equip them for corporate travel, business leaders must rightly assume their duty of care towards employees on official duty. This involves putting in place health and safety measures, providing adequate compensation, protecting employees’ emotional wellbeing, and so on. Several things can go wrong on a business trip but employees must be confident that they’ll be fine even if anything goes wrong.
Progress requires being dynamic. In the same vein, deciding your company’s preparedness for corporate travel in the post-COVID world requires assessing your previous policies and programmes and reinventing them in a new direction. Apparently, only 20% of companies made absolutely no change to their travel policy during the pandemic, as the GBTA poll shows. The vast majority of companies made changes involving cutting business trips, becoming more purposeful about trips, and increasing approval requirements for trips. For many other companies, the pandemic has been a time to re-evaluate how and why their employees go on business trips and even the very definition of ‘business travel’ itself.
In essence, you must bring your business travel programme up to the current trends. Not just because the majority of companies are doing so but because we live in a different reality than what was obtainable before COVID-19 took the world by storm. Right now, travel managers, HR leaders, and business executives are reinventing their travel programmes to be more focused on flexibility, purposefulness, and automation, among others.
For many individuals, the pandemic has steered them towards soul-searching their attitude to work and how it affects their familial bonds with their loved ones. Therefore, businesses must allow employees more flexibility in meeting options while also ensuring that every trip is necessary, purposeful, and aligns meaningfully with the company’s goals. To achieve this, automating your travel policy comes to play. Travel management companies like TruTrip sell flexible solutions that help companies achieve their corporate travel goals in line with the current prevailing demands.
The world continues to orient itself towards continuous technological advancements because they present easier ways to get things done. This applies to business travel too. Corporate travel policies can be hard to enforce and there are several reasons for that. Corporate travel policies are usually set in place to ensure that the company gets value from their employees and vice-versa. But some companies have difficulty enforcing these policies because they don’t have the right tools and technology in place.
Companies must adopt solutions that make their business travel processes more efficient. For instance, technology can help leaders automate travel policies and manage trip requests and approvals from a single platform. From there, stakeholders can access snapshots and detailed reports of business trips at the company. Executives can use this data to make informed decisions on budget control, sustainability, flexibility, and so on.
In fact, when you use technological solutions for business travel management companies such as TruTrip, you can save up to 30% simply by streamlining travel policies and inventory into a single platform for easy tracking. Then you can ensure that your employees are focused on actual value-adding work instead of wasting time planning trips, which could be easily automated.
To help companies evaluate their readiness for corporate travel and design appropriate policies, TruTrip created the TripSense travel readiness assessment tool. TripSense is for business owners, executives, travel managers, and business travellers and it consists of research-backed questions that help you determine if your company’s corporate travel policy is value-driven. As a travel management company, TruTrip simplifies corporate travel by providing an intuitive software solution that helps leaders create better travel experiences for their employees.
Try out TruTrip by booking a demo to see the ways you can supercharge your company’s business travel policy for meaningful experiences.
TruTrip streamlines booking, management, and reporting for hassle-free business trips.