Persuading high-flyers to fly less.
Roche wanted to find ways to reduce senior-level travel for cost and sustainability reasons, but without blunt requests or restrictions on a group of employees who were highly valuable to the business and its performance.
Challenge
How can we reduce corporate travel behaviour, without removing the choice to travel?
Swiss healthcare company, Roche, had followed most businesses in halting almost all corporate travel during the pandemic lockdowns. Having noticed minimal disruption to key business metrics during this time, Roche were interested to know if senior travel could be reduced significantly beyond the pandemic.
This outcome would also appeal to its sustainability leaders who were reporting increasing scrutiny from investors and the wider research community.
Solution
Understanding and leveraging the cultural and personal drivers of travel behaviour within the business.
Supporting an agency specialising in employee engagement, we initially ran research to better understand the drivers for travel behaviour (and the barriers to using alternative formats for meetings). We used a bespoke survey instrument, using a number of elements from the Theory of Planned Behaviour, Fogg’s Behaviour Model and the COM-B framework for behaviour change.
The results revealed that many travellers were indeed reluctant to do so, but felt it symbolic in terms of their senior role (subjective norms & automatic motivation). There were also concerns around ‘refusing invites’ for fear of suggesting a snub (subjective norms & automatic motivation). Finally, respondents reported that the processes to secure alternative methods were cumbersome and time-consuming (capability, motivation & perceived behavioural control). More broadly, we identified a sense of confusion in terms of which meetings warranted travel, and which didn’t (capability), leading to a ‘safe default’ choice.
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Armed with these insights, we designed and implemented a series of simple interventions. These ranged from a simple mnemonic to question whether travel was necessary, to email signature additions that signalled a desire not to travel for meetings. Social descriptive norms were also signalled through company-wide updates on travel reductions (with injunctive norms primed via leadership endorsement).
Results
Delivering a 52% reduction in travel across the business's most frequent travellers.
Crucially, no intervention restricted or removed the option to travel. Instead, we looked to provide timely ‘boosts’ (educative nudges) to participants. One year after the interventions were introduced, Roche reported that targeted travel costs had reduced by 52%.
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The project was submitted to the Institute of Internal Communication Awards, winning the prestigious ‘Best Change & Transformation’ category.