save Business Travel for new partners and hard talk

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In September 2022, Google told its senior managers they needed to spend more time in front of their screens and less time sitting in planes and relaxing in hotel bars. There would be no more team off-site events or social functions. If a virtual option was ever available for a meeting, that meeting would take place online instead of in person. Employee travel would be limited to “business critical” trips and those trips would have to meet a “high bar” to be regarded as critical.

The move follows Microsoft’s cost-cutting in April which targeted spending on business travel, outside training and company gatherings, among other expenses.

Following the rise of Zoom calls during the Covid pandemic, the stay-at-home instructions by a couple of America’s biggest firms suggests that even if the days of business travel aren’t completely over, they are at least being shortened. Companies have grown used to organizing online meetings. Team members have figured out the best virtual backgrounds to use and how to look interested even as the Zoom drones on. The accounts department likes the savings in plane fares, hotel bills and per-diems.

And yet the throttling of business travel hasn’t entirely happened. Despite the new familiarity of video meetings, the savings in travel expenses and the comfort being able to take part in a conference without leaving your home or even stepping out of your pajama bottoms, the business travel industry has largely bounced back from Covid. According to the U.S. Travel Association Q3 Business Travel Tracker, a September 2022 survey of business travelers and executives, business travel is already close to the levels seen before 2019. Respondents said that they planned an average of 1.8 business trips per month over the next six months compared to 1.9 before Covid.

So how are companies choosing now whether to hop on a plane to press the flesh or meet on Zoom and talk to a lens? And how should managers today consider the expectations of team members who might be excited about hitting the road or keen stay at home and stick with the family?

In a new study published in Tourism Management, a couple of researchers at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland asked an airline’s business customers about their preferences for business travel.

The Type of Meeting Matters

Adrian Müller and Andreas Wittmer assumed that the decision to choose a face-to-face meeting or a virtual meeting depended the characteristics of the meeting—its content; the relationship between the participants; and the general circumstances of the meeting—as well as the characteristics of the participants themselves, their experience, norms and attitudes.

The content of the meeting is important, the researchers said, because face-to-face communication allows for“‘thick co-presence,’ consisting of rich multi-layered and dense conversations involving body language, history, and status, among other  elements.”

They assumed that business executives would prefer to communicate information of high complexity in face-to-face meetings. They’d also prefer to negotiate agreements in person, develop strategies together, deliver informal messages, and discuss human resource matters. The deeper the conversation, the more likely they’d want to shake hands and sit in the same room.

The relationship between the participants matters too. The researchers noted that face-to-face meetings are important for building and maintaining personal relationships, trust, and network capital, particularly in the early days of a relationship.

“The degree of mutual trust in the personal relationship lifecycle, i.e., the duration of the relationship between individuals therefore also influences the choice of medium,” they wrote. “It is especially the first meeting in a new relationship when people do not know each other that is preferably conducted FtF [face-to-face], indicating the role of the regularity of meetings as an influencing factor.”

The researchers therefore assumed that while first meetings might be held in person, once participants have already met and know each other, they’ll be more willing to move their meetings online. Internal meetings can be held on Zoom, as can regular meetings, and talks between partners who have known and trusted each other for some time.

Location also matters, as does the size of the meeting. The more participants a meeting has, the greater the chance the attendees will want to get together in person, if only because Zoom calls grow less wieldy and less convenient as audience size increases.

The researchers did note a paradox though. Observers have found that as people engage more frequently in virtual meetings, they have a lower tendency to choose face-to-face meetings. But the frequency with which they can hold those virtual meetings creates wider social circles and a greater need to meet in person. The ease with which those participants can then use virtual communications to stay in touch with family while on the road also removes a barrier from making another work trip.

Virtual communication “may enable users to build and maintain larger networks,” the researchers argue, “hence also increase the necessity of travel while at the same time facilitating being away by enabling connections to home while on the road.”

The more we meet online, the more we want to meet offline too.

Finally, the seniority of participants and the field in which they work also affects the choice of face-to-face or virtual meeting. Knowledge-intensive business services such as management consulting, IT, R&D, legal services, and advertising, for example, have been found to rely strongly on in-person encounters, the researchers note. And managers tend to be more in favor of meeting offline than people lower down the company hierarchy.

So much for the theory. To test whether those hypotheses were true, the researchers invited 503 executives to configure their own face-to-face meetings and indicate which meetings from a list they’d prefer to hold in person and which they’d prefer to hold online. They also conducted interviews with fourteen corporate travel managers.

They found that most of their suppositions were right. Negotiations, workshops, brainstorming and creative work were the kinds of meetings most likely to be held in person. In-person meetings held in interesting locations such as western Europe were popular but so were meetings scheduled to be held in Asia. The researchers didn’t explain those findings. It’s possible that business leaders enjoy a few days in Paris or Shanghai as much as everyone else but they might also feel a greater need to cement closer ties with partners in far-off places.

One surprise was managers’ preference for HR meetings to be held virtually. The researchers suggested that the managers might see those meetings as someone else’s concern. “Perhaps the terminology we employed  was misleading, or general managers do not see HR matters as their responsibility but that of the human resources department.”

It’s also possible, of course, that managers prefer to fire staff and provide team assessments at a safe, if impersonal, distance.

The biggest surprise though was the role of virtual communication in the transfer of informal messages. The researchers had assumed that respondents would prefer to talk informally face-to-face even if what they had to say was complex. What they found though was that the complexity of the message mattered more than the formality of the exchange. Businesspeople, they mused, are now sufficiently familiar with video conferencing to use the platforms for informal conversations but prefer a physical preference when small talk turns into meatier business conversations such as those involved in alliance-building or conflict resolution.

Meet Old Friends Online, New Partners In Person

The image the researchers present then is complex. Managers and team members have now grown used to meeting online and accustomed to holding talks via Zoom, Skype and Teams. Sometimes, they prefer to hold those meetings digitally, especially if the meeting is with someone they’ve known for a long time, if the meeting is a regular occurrence and if the conversation isn’t going to become too heavy.

But if they’re meeting a potential partner or customer for the first time, if they need to meet lots of people, if the venue is in an interesting location or if the conversation is going to be the kind of difficult, complex talk that requires an awareness of body language and tone then they prefer to meet in person.

And people in the creative industries tend to prefer personal meetings most of the time anyway.

So as you’re trying to decide whether to buy a plane ticket or book a Zoom call, weigh up the circumstances of the meeting. Assess how long the people meeting have known each other. Ask yourself whether the conversation is going to involve troubleshooting, deep strategizing, or brainstorming big ideas.

If the conversation is going to be light and with people who know each other well, stay home and choose your virtual background. If the discussion is going to be long and heavy and involve people who don’t know each well then start packing a suitcase.

Unless you work for Google, in which case, make sure the meeting is business critical.

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