Duty of Care Converts to Compliance

Did travel management’s position within your organization change throughout the pandemic?

The amount of communication with other departments around the university and business units around the university as well as some with higher leadership within the university became more frequent, because of the dynamic nature of the T&E environment that was being driven by so many outside circumstances.

We are a research-based university, so we have people engaged in research projects globally. A lot of those research projects didn’t stop. So, there were entities around the university that were trying to decipher how we can continue to support research efforts and projects that were ongoing. Part of that increased the engagement with the travel department.

Did you see any changes from your travelers?

Michigan State University is not a mandated travel environment, and with higher education, generally speaking, you’ll find larger institutions are not. [But] the interest in duty of care by the traveler grew. As a result of that, the travel department and the controller’s office have continued to provide ever-improving tools—our online booking tool, our expense reconciliation tools, our support platform—[increasing our capacity to] communicate duty of care if you book through the preferred channels. The general travel population became more intent on having resources to lean on proactively. By communicating that booking through the preferred channels improved the duty-of-care platform … we have seen a consistent improvement in adoption of the preferred booking channels.

Faculty tends to be very dynamic in their travels, so we’re different from a corporation in that sense. Often grant funding is involved, so we have to abide by the grant rules, depending on who’s providing that grant. Other than the very specific spending rules of those grants, there’s not a mandate to a procurement channel. By leveraging the message, though, there’s an opportunity to improve the duty of care from door to door.

How have you measured the changes and what have you seen?

We audit our expense reports and match those to bookings through our preferred channels. Where we see [a discrepency]we look at the delta and measure that gap. It was a 79 percent adoption, and as we moved along the path of the pandemic, that grew to 82 percent. We currently stand just a skosh above 86 percent in a non-mandated environment. Now, we’ve leveled off, so I don’t know where we go from here, but we had just under a 10 percent improvement in 20 months.

Are there any particular skills the pandemic has spurred you to flex or improve?

The stretch has been stepping out of what we know and finding new information resources that we may not have accessed before so we can be proactive in assisting our travelers and organization to be prepared. [That could be] government websites or gaining knowledge of security support companies or being able to provide analysis of new and different products to assist with improving duty of care.

What resources do you tap for your own improvement?

I’m a lifelong learner, and I want to be the best travel manger I can be and be very active in the industry that is so good to me. One of the things I’ve benefitted from and invested in is the Global Leadership Professional program through the Global Business Travel Association. That is a financial and time investment, but it is the master’s class on new analytics, how to do regression analyses, learning tools and strategies on how to approach carbon footprint measurement and reporting.

What are your biggest challenge and opportunity now?

The biggest challenge is is to create that support environment where the end user really experiences service levels that not only meet but exceed their expectations. I would say that also is the biggest opportunity. If we can get there, we have happy travelers, happy travel planners, happy finance and the travel budget parts of the grants are aligned with the rules of the grants.