A 5-Step Guide to Sustainable Business Travel

By embracing a digital HQ, you can give employees the resources and tools they need to stay productive. In this digital-first model, organizations facilitate hybrid work and enable virtual collaboration between internal and external teams. A single digital collaboration tool that provides easy access to documents, data, and group conversations across your company’s entire ecosystem improves productivity and, in the vast majority of cases, eliminates the need to gather in person.

By enabling employees to work remotely, organizations can also improve business performance and reduce costs. When companies find ways to be more efficient — with space, equipment, materials, packaging, time, and so on — they can see lower operating costs as a result.

The concept of a digital HQ works best when talking about business travel for the purpose of collaboration. It requires the right technology to be successful, but even that has its limits. If you’re trying to help teams bond, build relationships with clients, attend a large conference, or physically set up a space, travel may still be necessary, and that’s okay. Having a digital HQ allows us to rethink and redefine purposeful travel but not eliminate it altogether.

Begin by partnering with your Travel Management Company to collect and analyze travel emissions data across all travel verticals and categories, such as air, hotel, ground, and rail. Analyze where the majority of your emissions are coming from and what the top origins and destinations are. From there, you can identify the most impactful emissions reduction pathways to decarbonize and promote lower-emission alternatives.

“You’ll need to dig into the data to consider where, why, and how your employees travel, defining what purposeful travel looks like for your specific company,” said Sabineu. “Travel managers play a critical role in tracking and reporting emissions while also enabling and encouraging employees to make greener choices.”

With your data insights in hand, you should assemble and consult a team of internal stakeholders from key business units such as travel, procurement, sustainability, finance, marketing, and sales. Gain a solid understanding of what drives them to opt for travel over virtual communication. With the input of your stakeholders, define specific attributes of purposeful business travel for your company. Then, you can update the policy and program guidance across your online booking tools to ensure recommendations are available at the point of sale. This is where decisions are being made by traveling employees​​.

Your employees will help you reduce travel emissions so long as you provide a seamless process. Using trusted AI, you can make it easy for your employees to make greener choices. Here are a few ways to optimize your booking tool with AI:

1. Personalize recommendations for eco-friendly accommodations.
2. Identify and eliminate of unnecessary expenses.
3. Optimize travel routes and modes of transportation.

Using the right data to power your AI is critical. By understanding where your travelers are going and what alternatives exist in those locations, you can bring visibility to lower-emissions travel options. Then, you can program this guidance into your online booking tool.

For example, you can optimize your online booking tool so that it sorts transportation options by emissions output instead of price or carrier. Change recommendations so they default to carbon-friendlier choices, such as sorting flights to show lower-emissions options first. Program specific, data-driven nudges into the online booking tool at the point of sale. This empowers employees to make smart decisions during the booking process with a platform that promotes low-carbon travel options.

At Salesforce, we’ve made choosing lower-carbon travel easy and efficient. We optimized our online booking tool to ​​recommend the lowest-emission modes of travel and make these options easy to choose. This enables easy mode-switching on routes where a more sustainable form of transportation is a viable alternative, such as traveling by rail instead of air.

Now, we’re working to make the impact of these choices more visible. We developed a dashboard that visualizes each employee’s travel-related emissions footprint. The goal is to help managers enable their teams and for employees to understand their individual impact by surfacing actionable insights and communicating personalized ways to reduce that footprint. Now, employees have visibility into their individual and team emissions.

Anytime you want to change any outcome, you first need to know your metrics. Then you need to track progress to stay accountable for the impact these choices have on the environment. Using carbon accounting and a dashboard that visualizes your carbon emissions footprint, you can better understand the impact of your efforts — such as sustainable travel policies and nudges across your online booking tool — have had on the environment and your organization’s sustainability goals.

Carbon accounting is the process by which organizations quantify their greenhouse gas emissions so that they may understand their climate impact, set goals to reduce their emissions, and identify risks and opportunities for the business. Ideally, a company will track scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions, which include direct emissions created and owned by the company, purchased energy, and indirect emissions, most of which come from the company’s supply chain. Unless the company owns the vehicles or aircraft employees are using, business travel falls into scope 3.

The Salesforce Carbon Accounting Guide provides a clear path to setting up a carbon accounting program. To account for business travel in particular, though, the simplest way is to connect your travel data from your travel management company, expense system, and credit card company to your ESG management platform. This allows all flights, hotel data, train rides, rental cars, and even taxi or rideshare data to be fed directly into your single source of truth, so carbon accountants can quickly see how much carbon is being emitted through business travel.

Once the travel data is in your platform, it needs to be calculated into carbon emissions equivalents. Your platform should apply purpose-built analytics and reporting to the integrated data set to provide an accurate, real-time view of how travel contributes to your carbon footprint. These insights will help you decide where to dial up your carbon reduction efforts. By continually analyzing your emissions output, you can iterate on your internal policies as needed. That could include incentivizing executives with higher compensation for low emissions or setting carbon budgets for individuals or teams or requiring shifts to lower-emissions modes of transportation (e.g., air to rail).

We encourage companies to build emissions data transparency into their contracts (and provide our Sustainability Exhibit as an example of the language such contracts might include). That allows companies up and down your value chain to track their own scope 3 emissions while staying accountable and eco-friendly.

To support the growth of sustainable aviation fuel, we became a founding member of the Sustainable Aviation Buyers Alliance. As part of the alliance, we help develop market infrastructure, drive demand, and engage in policy advocacy. Through this initiative, we see an opportunity for Salesforce to collaborate with airline suppliers and grow the market by aggregating the demand required from fuel producers. These supplier engagements will send a strong demand signal to the broader aviation industry.

Offsetting your remaining carbon emissions by purchasing carbon credits is the last step toward achieving net zero carbon emissions. Keep in mind that carbon credits aren’t created equal in terms of impact. Avoidance offsets, for instance, include limiting tree harvesting or stopping untouched land from being converted into farmland. Removal credits include investing in healthy forests and oceans, both of which are natural carbon sinks that efficiently absorb CO2.

Although purchasing a combination of avoidance and removal credits may be necessary in the short term, aim for only removal credits for the long term. This is because removal credits are designed to extract CO2 from the atmosphere, whereas avoidance credits prevent carbon from being emitted in the first place. To achieve a 1.5°C goal, we need to purchase both avoidance and removal credits now. But ultimately, avoidance should come from your actions, not your budget. So as your company puts enough policies in place to avoid roughly 90% of your emissions, you can gradually move your credit dollars away from carbon avoidance and toward carbon removal.

Reducing emissions throughout your organization’s full value chain should be your priority. However, emissions reduction will take time, and doing that alone may not be enough. Organizations should use all the tools they have to work toward the global goal of net zero, including purchasing carbon credits to help compensate for the emissions they haven’t yet reduced and to help scale climate solutions beyond their value chain.

From using the right digital tools that enable working from anywhere to optimizing your travel platform for low-emissions options, you can take steps — today — to reduce your carbon footprint inside your organization and meet reporting requirements. Externally, use your influence to encourage partners in your value chain to cut their own CO2 output, and take it a step further by exploring investments in the Sustainable Aviation Buyers Alliance or similar organizations. Most important, stay accountable for your progress. Set goals, measure results, and iterate on your strategy where necessary.

Net Zero Cloud is a complete ESG management platform that empowers companies to track, analyze, and report reliable emissions data in real time and enables them to meet their ESG goals. The business travel dashboard provides real-time insights into which employees are traveling and by what mode, which departments or geographies are responsible for the most carbon emissions, and insights for you to make decisions that help you achieve lower emissions with various actions and policies.

Salesforce Platform embeds conversion factors that conform to global standards and uses those factors to convert travel data into emissions data, saving you time and reducing calculation errors. The platform can also provide visibility into emissions data between you and your suppliers, helping your entire ecosystem achieve net zero.

Get trusted reporting and actionable insights on your business travel with Net Zero Cloud.