How Remote Workers Are Reshaping Corporate Travel Policies
07.04.2024 - 13:39
/ skift.com
Corporations have largely maneuvered out of the workplace upheavals inflicted by the global pandemic. One issue continues to vex managers: How to handle business travel for newly remote employees.
Nearly half of companies have revised policies to address travel by remote or hybrid employees, according to a January survey by the Global Business Travel Association.
More than a quarter of companies — 27% — said they’ve changed their travel policies since the pandemic and another 21% are formulating new guidelines. Another 40% of the survey’s 707 respondents said they are not altering travel programs for remote/hybrid employees.
“If you are kind of being pushed into the office, it may have been a client trip before and now it’s a trip to your head office,” said Andrew Wimpenny, a director at Amex GBT Global Business Consulting. “And are you staying a little bit longer?”
The top issues companies are working through:
Notably, 27% said travel costs are “significantly or somewhat higher” to accommodate hybrid/remote workers, while 37% reported no change in the costs.
When a valued employee relocates to Colorado but is needed periodically in Seattle or Los Angeles or Chicago, who pays?
“The real answer is: It depends,” Wimpenny said.
Some companies — most notably the large financial services firms and technology behemoths like Apple and Google — have imposed in-office mandates of three or four days per week. In those scenarios, the financial burden of commuting likely rests with the employee. In other cases, where a team member is required in an office only quarterly or monthly, the travel is mostly funded by the employer, Wimpenny said.
However, this issue isn’t widespread. “We’re not seeing it in large numbers,” Wimpenny said of data collected from travel buyers, suppliers and others in the corporate travel ecosystem.
“I think the expectation at the beginning of the pandemic was everyone moving out of large, expensive cities.”
The notion of a mass American migration from large, high-cost cities to Sunbelt suburbs throughout the pandemic was overblown. Moves spiked in 2020 and in early 2021. But domestic migration resumed its long-term decline by the end of 2021 and throughout 2022, according to Census Bureau and U.S. Postal Service data compiled by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.
California and New York lost more than 300,000 residents in 2020 and 2021 while Illinois lost more than 100,000, according to the center’s 2023 report on pandemic-era migration.
“When people did move during the pandemic, their location decisions largely reflected pre-pandemic preferences, though the movement away from large urban areas seemed to accelerate, benefitting suburbs of these areas as well as smaller