However I wasn’t far down in today’s pile before I ran across a press release from Sodexo touting its 2017 Global Workplace Trends report. Now Sodexo is a €20 billion company with 425,000 employees, so they might know a thing or two about what’s around the corner for the global workplace. Some of the trends include: Agile organization, a new iteration of collaborative workspaces, cross-border relocation, tapping Millennial talent, robotics and AI, Wellness 3.0. And that rounds up just a few. Tomorrow’s work environment blends work life with outside life, the press release notes, and leverages individual strengths as well as collaboration to meet personal and business goals.
“The world is evolving rapidly, and in a sometimes contradictory fashion: small and large, local and global, traditional and modern,” says Sylvia Metayer, CEO of Sodexo’s Worldwide Corporate Services segment. “It’s critical for business leaders to recognize the underlying trends driving change, to evaluate their significance and stay ahead of – rather than follow – them.”
So far, it sounds a lot like what we do every month in the pages of Business Travel Executive — recognizing the trends, and keeping you, our readers, ahead of the curve. (OK, score 1 on Buzzword Bingo.) As I browsed through the table of contents in this issue, I was struck by the number of topics we cover that five years ago would have scarcely been a blip on the industry’s radar.
Let’s start with the cover story, Money on the Move, (page 20) in which we delve into the future of travel payment technology. Turns out the answer to the question, “What’s in your wallet?” may well wind up being “Bits and bytes” as digital transactions overtake the physical kind. But of course that begs the question, “Who’s in your wallet?” as we discover in this month’s Tech Files feature, Smart & Smarter (page 34).
Another facet of corporate travel that would have garnered scant attention a few years ago was traveler expectations. After all, weren’t travel programs pretty much intended just to save money? Now the pendulum has swung; the value proposition counts the quality of travel, not just its cost, in calculating the return on the travel investment.
In the constantly evolving constellation of hotel experiences, hoteliers are happy to extend a Welcome to Change (page 26) – offering something new to fit the tastes of business travelers across every generation. And airlines are making Class Distinctions (page 12) – rolling out new cabin products in their long-haul fleets to meet the needs of both the budget-conscious and the comfort-conscious.
What we see month after month in our industry, and indeed in our world, is that change is inevitable. But how we deal with it is not; our response is entirely up to each of us. The more we know, the more we can learn. And the more we learn, the better we can envision the future.
