Lots of articles extol the virtues of travel—it expands the mind and makes people happy. However, there are also plenty of anecdotes about how awful traveling can be. Those two trends come to a head in the issue of business travel, and the latter wins.
According to a study from the University of Surrey and Lund University, people who travel frequently for business, dubbed the “hypermobile,” either flourish or flounder. Flourishing hypermobile business travelers “either deny the health implications of frequent business travel, or present strategies to actively overcome them” as they view travel as an integral part of their happiness and identity. Floundering hypermobiles, on the other hand, find that travel is “a source of unhappiness that endangers their health and psycho-social well-being.” And the majority of people in the study seem to be floundering.
As business travel continues to increase, this trend is unlikely to reverse without some serious work, much of which has to come from HR departments and other leaders, “top down” change, as it were.
“As more and more people are required to travel frequently for work, the impacts of travel on the workforce is an issue of rising importance on the public agenda,” said study lead author Dr. Scott Cohen of the University of Surrey. “In the next 10 to 15 years, it is very possible that we will see lawsuits being brought against companies who don’t take actions to help reduce their employees’ business travel.”
The answers though, aren’t as easy to find as the data in the study. Companies’ HR staff will have to talk to their frequently traveling employees, because the floundering hypermobile business travelers are generally unsure of how to improve their situation, seeing it as something over which they have no control.
The solution might be as simple as giving travel assignments to people who are more comfortable with frequent journeys in the service of their job, or cutting down on how much any one employee needs to travel to do their job.
Are you a hypermobile business traveler? Are you flourishing or floundering? What do you think should be done about the problem of hypermobility and how it affects employees? Please share your thoughts in the comments.