How to prioritise traveller well-being

Travellers may not be forthcoming about their personal needs while on a work trip.

When your travellers pack their bags for a trip, they’re focused on delivering a great presentation or developing new contacts at a conference. However, travellers are also balancing something else that they rarely discuss with their managers: their own well-being while on the road.

Recent research by Uber’s internal user experience research (UXR) team discovered that travellers not only acknowledge the need to maintain their regular healthy habits while on the road—whether that’s squeezing in a morning workout or eating a nutritious dinner—but also tend to deprioritise those needs in favour of getting the job done.

How can a travel manager ensure that these personal needs are met while achieving the ideal business outcome? In this blog post, we’ll discuss why prioritising traveller well-being is good for your organisation as a whole, and we’ll offer some basic tips that can be built right into the company travel and expense (T&E) policy.

There’s a well-documented connection between employee health and travel. A recent Harvard Business Review investigation discovered that travelling for work can have a negative impact on health, with frequent travel contributing to a number of chronic conditions such as sleeping problems and anxiety. That’s not to mention time zone adjustments, catching a cough on the plane, experiencing fluctuating weather patterns or any number of uncontrollable factors that can affect a traveller’s health.

Good performance and personal well-being are tightly intertwined, with the latter directly affecting a traveller’s decision-making process. In fact, 44% of those surveyed by the UXR team shared that stress-free travel is a priority for them. That’s because travellers know that they don’t perform at their best when feeling off their game.

Yet travellers hesitate to say that their personal well-being is a priority, the UXR team found. Instead, travellers framed their concerns in terms of impact on performance. If traveller well-being has such an impact on the end result of a work trip, it’s important, then, that travel managers incorporate best practices that can help travellers preserve their health while travelling.

While it’s not possible to predict every bump in the road, travel managers can make changes directly to the T&E policy that are designed to improve traveller well-being.

Traveller well-being and work performance aren’t just connected, they depend on each other. Travellers who feel run-down, stressed, tired or hungry can find themselves losing focus, which distracts from their business goals. Work performance isn’t just about showing up, after all—it’s about showing up alert, attentive and ready to excel at the task at hand.

To learn more about what’s going on inside the mind of a business traveller, download our research report.