Killing off talent with travel
- Summary:
- When a high level executive suddenly leaves because the weight of travel has become too much then we should be asking ourselves what the alternatives look like.
That was the surprise coming out of a conversation I had with someone who recently left a company and who has no immediate plans for the future other than going diving.
There's always a question of intrigue when a high profile executive leaves a well-known company. Did he or she jump? Was he or she pushed/poached? But this is the first time I've heard the following:
I came home one day and my youngest said, 'Are you really my daddy because you're never here?'. It hit me like a thunderbolt and I knew then I had to stop.
The executive-in-question says that he travelled 900,000 km last here. That's more than half a million miles in old money. Even at its worst, I cannot imagine traveling that much, but to hear the toll such extreme travel takes on the family struck me as obscene.
Earlier today, I saw a Facebook status update from my good buddy Vijay Vijayasankar, an exec at IBM. He had given up Martin Luther King day and was faced with this situation:
This is ridiculous. Took off an hour late from MCH and landed here at 10. Now 40 mins later - pilot doesn't know when we will get a gate. Not his fault - but how can the system be so messed up that there is no predictability?
It is but one example of the frustrations endured by people who travel frequently.
In my own case, I 'should' be on the other side of the country today, but decided last year that if I was going to park myself on the US west coast, then it makes no sense to travel to the east cost for a short trip when I have colleagues who are much closer to hand and perfectly capable of handling events.
On this occasion, that didn't work out so well for a variety of reasons, but the one that struck me? "They wanted you." And therein I think lies the rub.
I could easily take those words to heart and burnish my ego by thinking that in some cases I must be indispensable. That is both absurd and arrogant. No one is that important. But then that's not how people who are requesting your physical presence think. When they want YOU, they don't want a virtual you, a video-conferenced you or a substitute 'you.' They want the real you.
Does it have to be this way?
There are some answers, but they have to start with an ethos that values the health and welfare of the current generation, while building a bench of people who can seamlessly step into others' shoes.
For example, does anyone remember when Bill McDermott, CEO SAP suddenly went off the radar due to a horrific accident? From the outside, the company didn't miss a beat and I put that down to the long tradition inside SAP of building talent benches. I subsequently learned that during the early period of his recovery, McDermott was active on calls, but was not able to travel. As far as I know, that had little or no impact on SAP. People understood that a set of circumstances prevented McDermott from doing what he might otherwise have been doing and adjusted accordingly.
My colleague Vinnie Mirchandani bemoans consultant travel oncost that impacts implementation projects. He estimates that traveling adds an unnecessary 15-20% to consulting cost. Mirchandani says that modern conferencing technology should serve as an alternative, delivering up better utilization. That makes sense. I'd much rather be on a video conference than lining up for a taxi at stupid o'clock. Is that alternative realistic?
In another conversation. Phil Fersht, CEO HfS Research told me that the demand for webcasts among clients is growing. Hard-pressed decision makers simply don't have the time to run around to the seemingly endless stream of conference events.
Today, even when I am at a business conference, I almost never attend the keynote speeches. Instead, I soak them up from the comfort of a hotel room via a video stream. I still get what I need, but without the time wasted getting from a hotel room to a conference facility to a chair which may or more likely not, have a table upon which I can put a laptop to take notes. Paradoxically, I get the best seat in the house.
I am not suggesting for one moment that conference organizers routinely put on virtual keynotes today but that method of delivery cannot be far off on the future.
What will it take for executives to dial back the travel and for companies to figure out alternative workloads? We already have one extreme answer from the top of this story. Unfortunately, that resignation is highly-disruptive and will need to be overcome by the company he leaves behind.
Another answer may well lie with the travel industry itself and specifically the airlines. I don't know anyone who says that modern airline travel is fun. Reports consistently say that the airlines are finding new and inventive ways to squeeze more people onto already crowded aircraft. Personally, I dread anything more than three hours on a plane these days. Perhaps flying will become so unpleasant that executives will simply refuse on health grounds alone. That seems unlikely, but it is possible.
Whatever the answers, the time has surely come for us to take the health and wellbeing of key employees far more seriously than seems the case today.
Excessive workloads and excessive travel are not going to win any points with families who are left to get on with it. We have to recognize that no one individual is so important that we end up endangering the business through burnout or worse still, broken lives and broken families.
Digital technology is already here. We should take advantage of it wherever we can.
Disclosure: SAP is a premier partner at time of writing
Image credit: London Train Tube station Blur people movement in rush hour, at © alice_photo Fotolia.com