Paul Perry
Reinventing a travel program consists of more than just rewriting the travel policy, according to Nokia global sourcing director Paul Perry. It requires changing the employee mindset. In Nokia's case, cost-savings and emissions-reduction goals prompted Perry to enlist an external marketing firm for an awareness campaign and create an internal consulting group to work closely with department heads and other stakeholders. Along the way, Perry is aiming to help employees put travel into a different context that supports work-life balance. Perry last month shared his story in response to a recent Management.travelarticle about the evolving role of the travel manager.
Can you get into some details about your awareness campaign?
The awareness campaign was born from our "A Way of Working Team," where we were starting to look at a lot of different aspects of Nokia, and one of them was travel. The idea started in early 2008. We wanted to inform our employees about the effects of business travel on cost, for sure, but also on employee productivity, on their work-life balance, employee safety, health and also the environment. The problem was that Nokia, like a lot of other companies, had fallen into this pattern where business travel was the de facto method of achieving business objectives. People thought that in order to get their ideas and their work product presented, they had to physically go to either a meeting or to their boss or to a team and present that sort of stuff in person for a lot of international travel and a lot of internal travel. We actually started with some screensavers so when you're hooked up to the Nokia network and your computer goes idle, the screensavers appear and [show] little bits of information to plant seeds about the effects of travel. There were some environmental messages, some cost messages, some work-life balance messages. We also hired an external advertisement agency, because that is essentially what this was--an internal marketing campaign to change the hearts and minds and the way of thinking of Nokia employees. We also had a Web site where we had several blogs going on at once that any Nokia employee could get on and start. We also identified some heavy travelers in different parts of the world, in different organizations, at different levels and we asked about six of them to volunteer to stay grounded for a 30-day period--in other words, don't travel. They blogged their experiences on how they managed to achieve their objectives without getting on an airplane, and, of course, they had to be a little bit creative. We had to find alternative ways to make the information move and to share information, but it was really interesting to see how people changed their way of doing things and creatively found ways to make their information travel. Then we actually broke our own rule of travel, and we held live events in different high-travel cities. In Beijing, Helsinki, Finland, London and White Plains, N.Y., we actually brought in actors who were dressed like airport security to "search" people with the wand when they came into the room, and others were dressed up like flight attendants. There were announcements that would say this presentation would start in four minutes, please get to your seats, buckle your seat belt--all these sort of travel-theme things. We used another approach, called Pecha Kucha. It's a Japanese method of presenting information where you are limited to a certain number of slides and a certain number of minutes per slide to get your ideas across, and it's a very fast-paced method of presenting information. One person spoke about carpooling and using airport shuttles, someone else talked about what we could do with the money we saved and someone else focused on the effects on their family. This went on for about four months, and, at the end of that, we had lots of discussions on blogs, lots of e-mail back and forth between individuals and lots of face to face. We had a pretty well-informed employee group now globally, and we had great senior management support. I did a video interview with our CFO that was published on our intranet so everyone could hear how he had reduced his travel, and he even talked about how it had affected his family and how he had found different ways to do things. The company also has invested greatly in Halo and Tandberg [remote conferencing] technology. This is the mindset that you have to change: People will readily go to the airport and they will fly all night to Europe to go to a meeting, but they won't get up at three in the morning and go to a two-hour meeting on Halo. It's that sort of thinking that we tried to change.
Your next step was to rewrite the travel policy. What were the biggest changes you made there?
It has not been approved yet, but it's all around just doing the smart thing. The travel campaign was to teach people a new way of thinking, and the policy sort of reflects that awareness. They now know that booking two weeks in advance can lower airfare as much as 30 percent to 40 percent; they also know that picking the lowest-cost carrier that Nokia has contracts with is a good thing for several reasons. They know that they need to stay in Nokia-sponsored hotels that are in our program; they know that restricted tickets, for example, are the best way to go because even if you make changes or pay penalties or cancel the trip and pay a fee, overall for Nokia, it reduces airfare. These are the sorts of things now that the policy enforces, but just writing a policy doesn't accomplish an end result. One of the greatest things you can teach someone is to empower him or her to make a decision. For example, you wouldn't believe how many people told us that "I have to travel because my boss expects me to be there." Now we have worked through this process and empowered them to say to their boss, "I'm in the U.S. and for me to attend that meeting, I have to leave on Saturday and that's family time. My participation in that meeting could be virtual, so how about we just book a Halo suite and I join in virtually, and then I don't have to travel at all." We are empowering people to actually make those suggestions. Also, cost-center managers and line managers are now thinking this way. Instead of scheduling internal face-to-face meetings they are trying to use alternatives to business travel. We still have a significant amount of necessary business travel, but the company thinks differently about it now.
How do you plan on ensuring that there is compliance?
There are lots of ways to do that, but the main way for us [during the second half of this year] is going to be to use the travel consultancy service to work with large stakeholder groups. One of the things that we are going to do is use historical data to speak with cost-savings managers, line managers and individual high travelers and say, "Here's what you did in the past. If you changed these two things, here could be the result in the future. Here is how many meetings you scheduled that were internal meetings that could have been served by a Halo suite, so perhaps you should think about scheduling this regular meeting that you attend to a virtual meeting." Or perhaps we go to a cost-center manager and say, "Your people can travel the same amount that they do now, but you can lower your cost 30 percent if they book two weeks in advance." Nokia is not really a mandate-type company; we are not going to go report [people] to human resources. We really like to show people the beneficial way to do things and let them make the good decision. You can always go and squeeze 2 percent or 3 percent out of a supplier to save money, and you can always negotiate tougher and get more, but, in this case, we can get 20 percent to 30 percent savings in airfare alone by changing our own behavior.
Was there guidance that you received from headquarters or perhaps an outside consulting firm or travel management firm or any kind of precedent at other corporations that you want to emulate with this initiative?
No, as far as I know I have not seen another company do something like this. The guidance that I got from a steering team that I am a member of was that we want to change behavior, and it was that we want to have an awareness campaign that stresses some things that are important, but it was entirely up to me and my group on how that was done and the creative side of that was all our ideas. The inspiration came from a team of people from all over the world. I'm the global director of travel sourcing; it doesn't matter if I'm American or European or where I sit--we really don't look at it that way. It came from a global steering team that came up with different ways of working and looking at travel. Position on the planet is irrelevant. It's the quality of the message, not how you get it that's important. There are many ways to do that other than going on an airplane.
Did you do any sort of research beforehand, and what kind of numbers or hard evidence did you try to uncover before going out to the population with this?
The creative agency that helped design the creative message for the campaign helped us do some basic research. Of course we looked at the effects of travel on the environment. I involved our occupational safety and health folks inside the company, and there were some [stats] about how people who travel frequently have a higher percentage of sick days and things like that. In terms of work-life balance, that is the easy one. You don't miss your kid's birthday or your husband's or wife's birthday. Another thing about an international company is that I can't tell you how many Fourth of July's I have been on an airplane traveling back and forth to and from Europe, or Labor Day or Memorial Day, because those holidays aren't consistent globally. I have had to dig my heels in before on Thanksgiving to say, "No. Time out. I'm not flying--it's Thanksgiving." What people found, too, is that they really discovered just how much work they can get done if they stayed off the airplanes. There are many more hours to do good quality strategic thinking and productive work.