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Even if the mention of things like surge pricing, safety, duty of care, data protection and liability is all it takes to surface some of your sharing- economy reservations, it will help to interrogate how real or perceived your concerns are, how much they exist with traditional service providers and how you might overcome them.
The following recommendations offer four decisive actions you can take to reach a position on sharing-economy options that will help move your policy from one of tacit approval to one of active management.
75% of travel managers expect ground transport providers will play a major role in future business travel.
FIND OUT WHAT’S GOING ON... Learning what your employees are actually doing – on the ground, in the air, in transit – will give you an immediate snapshot of where things stand, particularly how pervasive their use of sharing-economy services is and how entrenched your company may already be.
Your best go-to sources to look at employee behaviour and find out what’s actually happening will likely be your corporate card programme, your expense management reports and your accounts payable files. So be sure to scrutinise your spending, create customised reports and then track the trajectory.
From this data, you should be able to extract some immediate findings that tell you more than just the extent to which sharing-economy services are being used within your organisation, like whether they correspond with certain demographics, specific departments or repeated destinations.
When you do look at your spending, be sure to compare prices. Though capturing prices varies widely from business to business and destination to destination, the important thing is factoring ancillaries (like meals, transfers, parking and time spent on bookings) into the total cost of travel.
GET THE APPEAL (AND GET WHY) If your people aren’t following your existing travel policy to the letter or sticking with preferred suppliers, it’s
important to know why. You can grasp this informally and selectively by talking to a wide and diverse enough group of employees or understand it more formally and inclusively via an online questionnaire.
The goal is to find out what real reasons are at play, which means no jumping to conclusions. You might learn, for instance, there’s a problem with your existing provisions or there’s a lack of service availability. There could be a link to a particular destination, or the experience could simply be more convenient.
Whatever the data points to, you will be in a much better position to identify any specific or widespread needs that your existing policy may be failing to meet, which will prompt you to think about how to develop new strategies to close those gaps.
NOW BRING OTHERS ON BOARD No decision that could alter your corporate travel management policy should be made in isolation, certainly not if the actions of surveyed travel managers in the process of reviewing their policy are anything to go by.
Involving colleagues across the organisation – including HR, legal, risk, finance, security and PR — raises the sharing economy as a wider issue and shares the responsibility for any decision to address it. Because considerations are likely to be widespread, their impact will likely extend beyond your duty of care to include matters as seemingly far removed as your company ethos.
Learning what employees are actually doing – on the ground, in the air, in transit – will give you an immediate snapshot of where things stand.
Even where duty of care and safety are concerns, it helps to think broadly about how existing policies address them. Sharing-economy supporters who, say, cite the incidence of crime in hotels may talk of taking wider precautions like partnerships with international assistance providers or required enterprise-wide staff training.
Involving others will support the outcome of decisions that can work in the best interests of the whole.
© 2016 Citibank, N.A. All rights reserved. Citi and Citi and Arc Design are registered service marks of Citigroup Inc.
ADVERTORIAL FEATURE
Based on your evaluations, the thing to do is to reach a position – even an interim one – and be sure to make it known to everyone.
MAKE A STAND, MAKE IT KNOWN Ultimately what you want to do is come to a decision – even if it’s only temporary.
Often travel managers, aware employees are using sharing-economy providers or travel policy is being undermined, choose to say nothing and reimburse expenses in the absence of communicable guidelines.
If compliance, security and duty of care are your priorities, however, then exercising this kind of tacit approval, which offers no tangible assistance to anyone, is likely the least favourable course action to take.
But even short of a complete policy review, you might do what many travel managers do and draw up and publicise a series of interim measures in the interests of offering some guidance to employees.
Measures of this kind can cover everything from clear prohibitions to what happens when employees themselves assume the responsibility of selecting the safest and most cost- effective solutions available.
It’s salutary to put all this into perspective, though, as the full spectrum of corporate responses to sharing-economy engagement range from outright bans to enlightened tolerance to unequivocal advocacy.
However you decide to proceed based on your evaluations, the best (and most important) thing to do is to reach a position – even an interim one – and then be sure to make it as familiar to everyone as you can.
To read the white paper in full, please visit our website:
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