In the past there was a great deal of waste paper: stacks of documents printed for each team member; some car and rail travel; lots of time spent walking corridors to gather for meetings and further printed and photocopied agendas, reports and minutes. Today things look very different: digital meeting packs; instant document-sharing, messaging and collaboration, within the office and internationally; and most relevant here, team members being far more likely to get on a long-haul flight to meet clients and the rest of their project colleagues.

But whatever happened to the vision for information technologies as a substitute for environmentallydamaging long-haul business travel? The ability to transfer large amounts of data electronically, share work computer screens and meet by videoconferencing was meant to end or at least reduce the need to travel. Rather than substitute business travel, digital technology has mostly just complemented it. And more than this, it has provided the conditions and opportunity for global organisational and working models in the first place. Without email, Skype and documentsharing software the practical basis wasn’t there for making strategic changes to the infrastructure and planning of business operations that has driven globalisation.

Technology has changed attitudes to the nature of working time and space, generating the dispersal of work teams, client bases and managerial responsibilities. Rather than any decline, the American Express Global Business Travel Forecast 2018 has pointed to 5% growth in long-haul business trips from North America and the Middle East, 3% growth in Europe.

Hyper-Mobile

Many businesses monitor overseas trips and the resulting carbon footprint, and have a travel policy ensuring there is no ‘unnecessary’ travel, that public transport is used over cars where possible. It’s all important in principle, but doesn’t touch the actual causes of increased travel. Once a ‘need’ is created it begins to look unavoidable. It’s not so different from the situation in Higher Education where institutions have become entirely committed to sustainability at the very same time that international operations and regular global travel have also become intrinsic to university life.

To learn more about the underlying causes for the increasing demand for business travel we looked closely at the efforts of two different engineering consultancies to reduce their carbon footprint. The work was carried out through the DEMAND research centre, one of the six funded by Research Councils UK to explore the nature of energy demand. Both of our case study firms have a strong UK presence, but also have a global reach and reputation.

In short, the demand for business travel over digital collaboration has come from the reorganisation of businesses in a range of sectors; particularly in the professional services (such as accounting, advertising, architecture, engineering and law). Pressure for greater cost-efficiencies, heightened by the global recession of the late 2000s and encouraged by the availability of ICT, has led to a new normal in terms of organisations based around more flexible, global structures of resources: replacing large in-country teams with a smaller international network of specialisms. Projects are less likely to be staffed locally, but draw on wherever there is experience and capacity globally. And this has meant a need to coordinate businesses that are working across different locations and time zones using of a hyper-mobile class of workers.

When organisations look at whether travel is necessary under this new model, the answer is clear. It’s critical: for professional and personal outcomes (such as client relationship management, running multiple offices, outsourcing expertise, camaraderie and simply ‘being seen’ to get out and about); managing the relationships between new technology, firm strategy and work activities. We gleaned more detail on how this actually works in practice from interviews with the two UK-based firms. The introduction of emerging technologies such as videoconferencing, Skype and cloud sharing had not replaced physical interaction; the shifting expectations and norms created by these technologies had led to a greater volume of interaction, including more travel. Despite increasing resources allocated to virtual ways of working, office reconfigurations were often specifically designed to support and facilitate large multidisciplinary project team meetings, responding to the need for physical travel to manage or bring together geographically dispersed teams. Members of staff were encouraged to develop careers that include experience of working on international projects, and managers were given Key Performance Indicators that include visiting experts across various sites.

Reimagining How to Work

In practice, reducing demand for business travel requires a different approach to the problem. Travel has become accepted as a necessary evil, as something inextricably entwined with how 21st century business is carried out. Experience shows that new ICT platforms –more reliable videoconferencing, holographic meetings –won’t make a difference to the need for personal presence and interaction. Deglobalisation within a competitive global marketplace would be a form of commercial suicide for many organisations, and in any case, is bound up with bigger and more complex issues of geopolitics.

There is potential, to an extent, for decoupling business travel from business activity, when there is a hard and enforced strategy of substituting technology for physical mobility. The long-term solutions will, though, only come from a reimagination of ways of coordinating business activities. Twenty years ago we wouldn’t have thought that teenagers would meet less frequently on street corners, be less dependent on cars, parties and alcohol, because their social lives would revolve around mobile phone applications (reportedly leading to fewer car accidents and fewer teenage pregnancies). In the same way there will be a new model of delivering commercial projects and services without the old dependence on overseas travel, allowing us to escape the trap of ICT fuelling more and more energy demands. But we need to work together –academia and the business world –to imagine and test how that might happen; the idea isn’t here yet, but around the corner as new coordination technologies emerge that move us beyond questions about how to improve videoconferencing.

Professor James Faulconbridge is Head of the Department of Organisation, Work and Technology. There's more information on the DEMAND issues and research projects at: demand.ac.uk j.faulconbridge@lancaster.ac.uk