GUEST COLUMN CHRIS CROWLEY
Americas .media
VIRTUAL COLLABORATION
A new role for travel managers: convincing road warriors to stay home
13/05/2016 12:33 @ServAptNews | #SASAmericas
O
nly a few short years ago, audio- and video- conferencing
technologies were so universally unreliable or ineffective they became the subject of some very humorous Youtube parodies. One of my favourites, called A Conference Call in Real Life, has already been viewed more than 13 million times. It highlights the typical problems we’ve all encountered with complicated PIN codes, login errors, freezing screens, dropped callers, echoes, barking dogs and unintentionally muted lines. If you watch them today, you can’t miss the fact that they’re now sponsored by companies offering the very types of services lambasted in the videos. This tells us that collaborative technologies have vastly improved – and people’s attitudes towards them have changed, too.
In fact, virtual collaboration technologies are now widely accepted as a viable option for working with people remotely. The workplace itself is rapidly changing, and employee attitudes and expectations are also changing. When we can, we business people want to use our favourite consumer
BUYINGBUSINESSTRAVEL.COM A massive
opportunity to shift travel spend to higher-value trips...
applications to better perform our jobs. We check Trip Advisor to decide where to stay on a business trip. We use Lyft or Uber to secure a ride to our meeting. We want to check in with colleagues using Skype or Facetime, like we do with friends and family. Professionals expect to have
great collaboration choices, too. Sure, they know they can travel and collaborate in person – but they also know from Facetime, Google Hangouts or Skype that video collaboration has improved. So they’re looking to use those same types of options at work, whether it’s Skype for Business or Webex, a modern conference-room system or even telepresence. And when possible, to use them instead of travelling.
The attraction to virtual technology by travellers is
easy to understand, but now companies are also beginning to realise the benefits of ‘total collaboration management’:
• Reduced travel spend • Increased productivity • Reduced carbon footprint • Stronger global working relationships
• Increased employee retention
Savvy business leaders never pay suppliers more than necessary, but there’s a huge difference between wanting to negotiate the best price and wanting to reduce overall travel spend. Growing businesses are reluctant to curtail revenue- driving investment – they just want to ensure the biggest possible return on investment. That’s why tomorrow’s
13/05/2016 12:33
travel programmes are certain to include total collaboration management. It represents a massive opportunity to shift – or increase – travel spend to higher-value trips.
Instead of managing face- to-face collaboration and virtual collaboration in silos, companies will manage and integrate all options. Given the huge potential of total collaboration management to provide business with a competitive advantage, travel managers needn’t think they have to go it alone. An organisation’s travel management company should be expected to provide total collaboration management as part of its scope of services. That’s why BCD Travel and our travel consultancy, Advito, recently teamed up with Cisco to increase our clients’ use of the technology. We’re working to help companies enable employees to identify and use the collaboration option that best fits the purpose and to create travel-avoidance strategies that
Chris Crowley is senior vice-president, global client management EMEA at BCD Travel. A 25-year travel industry veteran, he has previously served as president of ACTE and chair of the ACTE Foundation, and recently joined the ITM board as supplier director.
make it easier to ‘stay home’. For virtual collaboration
to effectively replace certain types of travel, inevitable questions arise: do employees understand what options are available and how to use them? Which trips drive revenue, and what business can be effectively handled online? How do individuals decide when to travel and when to stay home? What does a strategic approach to total collaboration management look like? Today, operationally-focused technology departments make investment decisions on virtual collaboration tools at most organisations. That’s likely to change. Just as strategic sourcing in travel has shifted to procurement, decisions over when to travel – or which collaboration type is most productive for a given situation – will become more strategic. With their depth of experience in helping employees make the right booking choices, travel managers just might be in the best position to manage the costs and benefits of all types of professional collaboration.
BBT JULY/AUGUST 2016 89
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100
