Munich During the pandemic, many companies have drastically reduced business trips. In the meantime, employees are increasingly making their way to trade fairs and business meetings. But the pressure on companies is high to limit costs and CO2 emissions from travel.
At Siemens, for example, the CO2 emissions caused by business trips halved last year to 63,000 tons. In 2019 it was even 232,000 tons.
This year, the Dax group is preparing for a slight increase in the number of business excursions. However, costs and climate impact should remain as low as possible. A Siemens employee, together with a team and the start-up Convien, has now developed an app that determines the best meeting place when business partners from different locations want to get together. The “Meeting Point Optimizer” is already being actively used at the technology group.
“Previously, people either chose the meeting place out of habit or met where it was most beautiful,” says Jessica Yari-Miguez from Siemens Global Business Services. With a view to travel costs, efficiency and climate impact, this is not up to date.
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Sustainability is playing an increasingly important role for many companies when it comes to business trips. According to the current study by SAP Concur and iResearch, 18 percent of companies in Germany believe they have implemented fully sustainable travel guidelines. Another 52 percent have at least partially implemented the topic.
Platform solution also for other companies
“Business travel managers in companies recognize the need for action and are motivated to improve the carbon footprint of their business travelers,” says Götz Reinhardt from SAP Concur, which offers solutions for booking and accounting for business trips. Companies should help employees by “supporting sustainable travel options with intelligent and digital tools when booking and highlighting them in the booking tool”.
>> Read also: As the Dax companies react to the travel chaos
The team around Siemens manager Yari-Miguez has now developed such a tool itself. She works at the internal digital consulting organization Siemens Global Business Services. When her boss once had to go to a meeting in the south of Munich, although the majority of the participants came from the north of Germany, he was looking for an optimization tool.
A cross-departmental team led by Yari-Miguez then worked with the start-up Convien, which had a similar project running, to develop a digital tool that determines the ideal location for a face-to-face meeting. The start-up also wants to offer the platform to other companies.
When determining the best meeting place, the places of origin of the participants as well as the availability and price of train or plane and accommodation, the travel and waiting time and the overall carbon footprint are taken into account. “On average, our costs and CO2 emissions drop by around 20 percent when the Meeting Point Optimizer is used,” says Yari-Miguez.
In the pandemic, the business travel policy of many companies has changed. It has been shown that shorter meetings in particular can also take place digitally via video call and that some meetings are completely superfluous.
Companies must become climate neutral
The travel budgets of some companies should no longer reach the old values. In the so-called barometer survey, which the business travel association VDR carries out regularly, 61 percent of the companies stated in spring that they wanted to reduce the number of their trips by up to 30 percent. Just under nine percent of the companies surveyed want to return to the pre-crisis level.
This is also due to the sustainability goals of the companies. For example, Commerzbank wants its operations to be net climate-neutral by 2040. To this end, buildings are to be further optimized in terms of energy efficiency, but business trips are also to be restricted. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had also appealed to companies to rely more on video conferences instead of face-to-face meetings.
>> Read also: The renaissance of business travel as escapism
If Siemens employees are now planning a meeting with colleagues from other locations, they can use a program directly in the e-mail program that displays the CO2 emissions for the meeting. A browser-based program with interfaces to hotel and flight portals then enables concrete planning.
This suggests various meeting points in a row and shows the costs for travel and accommodation, how big the CO2 footprint is, how long the participants are on the road and how often, for example, they have to change trains.
Depending on your preference, you can then select the right meeting point. Yari-Miguez reports that nine times out of ten, the most sustainable location is also the cheapest. “Our long-term goal is that every employee uses the tool on every trip.”
The Association of German Travel Management points to a problem with all the efforts made by companies to travel in the most climate-friendly way possible when face-to-face events are necessary. So far, there is no uniform formula for calculating CO2, VDR Vice President Inge Pirner told the Handelsblatt.
Worms University compared a number of CO2 calculators. “The calculated CO2 footprints for one and the same event differed by up to 25 percent.” Every climate calculator works differently. The association is therefore campaigning for a uniform method of investigation. “Implementation is still difficult, but the goal is to create transparency for all data that is relevant to a business trip.”
More: Siemens makes first quarterly loss in twelve years