With the world returning to a degree of normality after the pandemic, face-to-face events are becoming more frequent across North America. With the thawing of international restrictions, businesses are also becoming more comfortable allowing their employees to travel to different locations in the hope that it will benefit the growth and culture of their business.
As we look towards 2023, business travel is as important for company culture and growth as it was in 2019. In this article, we look at the main reasons why.
No Substitute For Face-To-Face Relationships
Despite the continued use of pandemic-era workarounds like MS Teams and Zoom, there is no getting away from the fact that humans are social animals who thrive on face-to-face relationships.
Business travel provides a unique opportunity for corporates to build direct personal relationships with clients, partners, and vendors in other parts of the country and internationally. It also opens the door for employees to obtain invaluable insight into different cultures and markets, while giving them experience in independent problem solving, decision making and communication skills that they wouldn’t gain from videoconferencing. In all these ways, business travel can grow a company's team culture and develop its competitive advantage in a reinvigorated marketplace.
Better Team Building And Collaboration
It isn’t just sales teams and customers that benefit from face-to-face contact. Business travel can also encourage a sense of collaboration, cohesion, and camaraderie between employees, especially when preparing for and delivering a company initiative at a tradeshow or conference in a different state. When employees are immersed in a shared project with separate goals outside of their normal work remits, they gain a greater appreciation for what their company stands for, as well as (in some cases) a deeper understanding of how the business works from an international perspective.
A business trip also involves more than just work. Colleagues get the chance to spend time with their co-workers outside the walls of their office, which is a great opportunity for team building and informal bonding. Engaging with colleagues in this way gives the team greater knowledge and respect for each other as human beings, and not just job roles, building trust and establishing stronger bonds between them. This type of shared informal experience – the goal of many team building initiatives – is irreplaceable in developing resilient and flexible teams that are more productive and effective.
Employees can integrate these direct and indirect experiences to better empathize with their co-workers, managers, and colleagues in other departments, cross-cultural collaboration can become easier, and workplace communication improved.
An Environment For Growth And Personal Development
Business travel allows employees to develop their technical work-based competencies by assimilating new technologies and unfamiliar processes – including skills not directly related to their job responsibilities, as well as specific role-related skills. Being exposed to different tools, procedures, techniques and practices in other cities or countries – and even other languages and ways of working – can help your employees become more mindful of their own work, recognising areas for improvement, and increasing their productivity, while bolstering the value they bring to the company.
Business Travel And Hybrid Working Practices
A hybrid workplace that encourages regular business travel can improve company culture, morale, and productivity as it gives employees the opportunity to work away from home in a new environment that could provide inspiration for future business ideas. A growing number of American businesses are using the re-emergence of business travel after the pandemic to reshape their business models, as their priority shifts towards development and market diversification.
Mantic Point is on-hand to make corporate travel management easy for businesses, giving users access to a bespoke, modular corporate travel platform with a variety of apps and tools available to suit their travel requirements. Please call today to find out more.
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