A familiar knee-jerk reaction

We’ve all been there. The economy goes into the down side of one of its never-ending spasmodic cycles and the word comes down: Freeze all business travel!

The urge to batten the hatches when times get rough is understandable and necessary; that’s how responsibly-managed companies survive the hard times. It’s just that a sweeping ban on business travel makes no sense at all in the context of survival, because such travel has an important role in securing the future of the very company you’re trying to help. It never ceases to amaze me how the significance of such budget cuts eludes many senior managers.

Why business travel really matters (in my view)

Here’s my main point: Business travel is a strategic investment in the long-term success of a company. This is so because it serves – among other things – three indispensable functions, all with obvious immediate benefits, but whose real importance goes far beyond the “work at hand” that they serve. Here they are:

• Attending Conferences.
  Professional conferences and workshops serve to immerse attendees in a social circle of peers, teachers and role models that can have a huge impact on their professional development. In my experience, the combination of removal from the day to day stress of your regular job, the intake of lectures by leaders in your field, the opportunity to exchange views with people from other companies and from academia, and the creation of new friendships with such people – all these combine to make you a better professional employee. Whatever your job, exposure to this intense and exhilarating professional surround has a lasting impact.
• Face to face meetings.
  Meetings with remote coworkers and global teams, people you work with but may have never met in person, are critical to effective collaboration. You’d think that today’s remote communications technology would make face contact unnecessary, but I can tell you that even if we could afford true high-quality lifelike videoconferencing (which most companies just skip) we’d still not come even close. The audio and video tools we have are great for 90% of the interactions – as long as we have a foundation of face to face meetings, perhaps once a year, to cement the human rapport. This holds for one on one work and even more so for global distributed teams, where the team’s cohesion is even more dependent on actually having some beers together.
• Training and education.
  We do have a variety of excellent remote training tools, and a large company can save money by making the teacher travel rather than the students; still, some of the better courses are held in remote locations. Attending technical training about a machine you work with at the company that had built it, taught by the grand masters who had designed it, together with your peers from other companies, is an experience that no CBT can approach.

In addition to which, the very change of environment and people leads to new value. The best ideas I ever had – ideas that had enabled me to transform the organization I worked in – came to me during business travel. For instance, Intel Corp’s global Telecommuting program was a direct result of a chance conversation I had with a guy from a different company at a conference in New Orleans; and my involvement in Technical Leadership development, including the creation of a successful Technical Community in the company’s IT group, came from another conversation over coffee during a business trip I made to Arizona. In neither case was this outcome part of the trip plan; it’s just that during travel you meet different people with different points of view, and you’re not all distracted by the day’s latest urgent line problem, so you have the input and the presence of mind to connect new dots and create new value.

And then there’s the impact on employee motivation. This is particularly relevant in younger employees (sadly, the ones whose travel funds are most likely to be axed). Take a new college grad, who possibly has never even left his native land. For them to be sent to a remote conference or supplier class at company expense – how exciting and empowering a vote of confidence is that?

What you should be doing about this

With business travel having all this benefit, it’s tragic to see how easily it gets canceled when times get tough (and I don’t mean tough as in Chapter 11; we’ve all seen how business travel budget disappears as soon as revenue gets nicked ever so slightly). I note that even in tough times a smart company won’t cancel R&D programs, or the purchase of strategic technology and equipment. Management is proud to point out how they continue to invest in the future of the business despite a temporary downturn. Except, that is, in the most important aspect of that future – people, and their professional development, which is what travel is all about in the sense discussed above.

So what do I suggest management should do?

• Treat travel as a strategic, not a tactical, investment.
• Realize that travel isn’t a perk. Sometimes it can be fun – and there’s nothing wrong with employees enjoying it – though frankly, after a while the hassle and jet lag take much of the shine off. But the point is, fun or not, business travel is a tool to advance business results.
• Don’t decree TOTAL travel bans. Not all business trips are created equal. Work with middle managers – the ones who know the details of each trip in their group – to pick out the trips that will contribute to the knowledge and professional growth of employees. Preserve these trips and postpone or cancel the others.
• And always remember the bottom line: Sweeping travel freezes are bad for business!

So – how does your company handle this matter? Do share your view in the comments!