CEO at Topia, the leader in Global Talent Mobility.
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While much of the world remains on a pandemic-imposed travel hiatus, there are signs that good news is on the horizon. The CDC has updated its travel guidance for vaccinated Americans, which hopefully means that at least domestic business travel will resume again.
In many ways, the lines between flexible work and business travel have blurred, and the distinction between the two has become very dynamic. With the freedom and flexibility to work from anywhere, many employees are already exploring new working environments. Whether it’s an extended stay with family in Florida or a month-long retreat at a cottage in the mountains, the very definition of business travel — working somewhere outside your office — has now become the definition of distributed work.
These blurred lines have created several challenges for companies that are still trying to figure out how to make flexible work a long-term solution. First, they may not know where employees are. According to our firm’s recent survey, nearly 30% of employees have worked outside their home state or country, but only a third of those actually reported those days to HR, with 24% reporting none at all. Relying on staff to self-report their location creates significant risk when it comes to legal and tax compliance. Failure to accurately pay taxes in the jurisdiction where employees are working can result in severe penalties, while other companies may be grossly overpaying taxes (registration required) for employees who are no longer working in the office.
Secondly, knowing where employees are is critical for ensuring their health and safety. As many companies discovered when borders closed in mid-March 2020, the lack of reliable location data created tense moments as employees scrambled to return home from international business travel or overseas assignments while some missed the window altogether. Companies must do better to protect their employees from health crises like Covid-19, as well as account for potential political or social unrest.
Finally, flexible work will change how companies approach business travel altogether. Rather than ad hoc trips, I expect that travel will become more strategic and long-term. Instead of an employee flying 12 hours for a one-hour meeting with a client, companies will demand more ROI and a stronger business case. For example, employees will have to plan for multi-week trips, set up more meetings and pack in more “value” in order to justify the expense and the potential risk.
At the same time, the isolation and lack of team engagement caused by many still working from home may drive an increase in the number of historical non-travelers hitting the road. Even though we can work virtually with Zoom, Slack, etc., many of us would agree there’s still a sense of connection that’s missing. So, while it might seem logical that we’d travel less, the opposite may in fact be true: In order to rebuild team cohesiveness and collaboration, I suspect companies will plan quarterly off-site meetups for team building and strategy sessions that have a larger number of employees traveling.
All of these nuances create a very fluid situation that makes it challenging for companies to manage business travel via traditional means. As business travel and flexible work merge, it’s driving a more urgent need for employers to manage and consider the following factors.
1. Employee safety: The pandemic is not over. If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that there’s always the risk of an international crisis right around the corner. Having real-time insight into where your people are at any given time will be crucial for navigating unexpected challenges. Through firsthand experience I know that tracking employees’ locations via GPS, VPN access, etc. is much more accurate than relying on them to self-report. However, it’s important that this approach is done tactfully, and any form of tracking is only done with employee consent. Fortunately, 94% of employees we surveyed would consent to employers tracking their location down to the city level to help mitigate the risk.
2. Compliance: Having a protocol for managing employees’ locations can solve both flexible work and business travel compliance issues. Early adopters of travel solutions were in a much better position to manage the shift to distributed work because they were already aware of the tax and legal implications of employee location. Location-based tracking for this reason alone may pay for itself multiple times over, especially if it saves you the cost of an audit or prevents you from overpaying or underpaying taxes and incurring penalties.
3. Travel ROI: Because the stakes are higher than ever as companies look to maximize the ROI for every business trip or relocation, you need to make sure you’re sending the best and brightest people to where it matters most. That means measuring travel ROI alongside talent management is critical. If you invest in relocating your best people and they leave because they don’t see the potential for professional growth, you’ve lost potentially thousands or even millions of dollars. Seeing the bigger picture allows you to make smarter decisions.
Covid-19 may have put a major damper on business travel, but the shift to flexible work has created unprecedented mobility for employees, blurring the lines between the two. In fact, distributed work may prompt people to travel more, which means companies must act quickly to implement policies and solutions to manage the complexity and fluidity of the new world of work as travel tentatively churns back to life.
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