When the U.S. Supreme Court this month blocked a Biden administration plan to require large companies to ensure their workforces are vaccinated against Covid-19 or subject unvaccinated employees to weekly tests for the virus, it denied human resources departments at U.S many companies a cudgel to help develop and enforce Covid policy. 

Now, they'll have to fashion and apply a policy that, whatever they decide, inevitably will anger and alienate a portion of their workforce and potentially their customers. (Look at Carhartt.)

The Biden administration may rework the plan to apply a vaccine mandate through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and try again, and some states and cities might follow New York City's lead to try to enact their own private-sector mandates. But let's assume that most companies—excluding some healthcare entities for which the Court allowed the mandate to stand—now are on their own in determining how they'll go forward with Covid, the vaccines, the boosters and policies surrounding in-person office work, travel and live meetings.

That's likely to be a messy process, fraught with anger and recriminations. It's also likely to generate outcomes that don't necessarily follow a particular trend. Some companies likely will take strong stances requiring employee vaccination, while others do the opposite, and it's not clear whether there will be consistency in those decisions by industry, company size or geography.

While the lightning spread of the omicron variant again scrambled some companies' reopening plans, we know some companies already had developed bifurcated business travel policies that limited the ability to travel for work only to the vaccinated. 

So how will companies push past omicron and whatever comes next to approach business travel? Will they drop some distancing and masking provisions as omicron fades to begin to return to a pre-2020 normalcy? Will they go the other way, and begin to require Covid-19 vaccination booster shots to attend in-person meetings and travel for business?

The answer could well be both, and many points in between. The approaches companies take toward Covid-19 and the vaccine, and by extension business travel, are likely to vary widely. 

As such, many companies may well find themselves in the position of needing to enforce restrictions on unvaccinated (and/or unboosted) employees when it comes to traveling for business. Since travel management companies thus far have not been enthusiastic about helping corporate clients design and enforce travel bans, corporate travel managers may have to look internally to do so. 

Finding a sweet-spot method that limits or denies unvaccinated employees' ability to book business travel while respecting their privacy will be a challenge for those organizations that pursue that policy.

Travel managers, human resources managers and senior executives in 2022 and probably beyond will have to work closely to ensure that, whatever an organization's policy toward unvaccinated employees and business travel, records regarding employee vaccination are accurate and up to date. 

Further, it also seems possible that there could be additional integration between HR management platforms and travel profile systems so that employee vaccination status can be taken into account at the point of booking. Without appropriate Covid-19 clearance, be it vaccination or booster, the system could then prevent a booking.

Otherwise, organizations could face a situation in which enforcing the policy could fall to managers who are aware (or not) of unvaccinated employees' status. That's hardly foolproof, especially for those employees who aren’t in an office, and enforcement will be difficult.

In any event, it seems clear that whatever organizations decide regarding post-omicron travel and vaccination, they'll need to expend additional attention and resources into pre-trip management.