Feature

Working environment

Will the green issues we appeared to be so passionate about at the turn of the millennium suffer in tomorrow's world, asks Bob Papworth

For those who have only just established that a 'barista' is a mere mochaccino-monger rather than a high-flying member of the Italian legal profession, a 'frugalista' may come as an alien concept - but not, if Jonathan Green, an associate with sustainable business consultants JMP is to be believed - for much longer.

A frugalista, according to the lexicographers at the New Oxford American Dictionary, is "a person who lives a frugal lifestyle but stays fashionable and healthy by swapping clothes, buying secondhand, growing own produce, etc." He or she will almost certainly indulge in a lot of 'hypermiling', defined by the American wordsmiths as "an attempt to maximize gas mileage by making fuel-conserving adjustments to one's car and one's driving techniques".

Both terms, Green suggests, will soon become common coinage, just as 'carbon neutral' was utterly meaningless until 2006, but is now widely accepted as an alternative to 'sustainable' or 'environmentally friendly'. Hypermiling frugalistas will become commonplace simply because environmental concerns, fuelled by endless pictures of polar bears paddling pointlessly around a floe-free Arctic, are here to stay. We have become a nation of Kyoto-quoting eco-warriors and, rightly or wrongly, business travel is getting it in the neck.

To win public approval and the consumer spending that goes with it, companies have perforce accepted they have to clean up the corporate act before Lincoln cathedral becomes a shipping hazard.

Or have they? Earlier this year, the Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE) teamed up with expense management giant KDS to produce a report on the "combined impact of the financial and environmental crises on organisations' travel behaviour".

Snappily entitled Against All Odds Sustainable Development May Survive the Crisis in the Business Travel Industry, the report says that despite the credit crunch, companies are "maintaining their commitment" to corporate social responsibility (CSR).

In the very next sentence, however, it adds the rider that "green" travel is "suffering as organisations put cost-saving ahead of the environment".

A survey sample of 329 respondents, nearly two-thirds of whom have procurement or travel responsibilities, was asked to rank the importance their organisation places on employee security, cost reduction, and "supporting environmental sustainability".

In 2008, "high" importance was attached to employee security by 78 per cent; 72 per cent gave a "high" rating to cost reduction; green issues got a paltry 29 per cent of the "high" vote.

This year, cost reduction came top with 78 per cent, employee security slipped to 75 per cent, and a "high" ranking was accorded to environmental issues by a mere 17 per cent - just 56 companies out of the 329 total.

More than 60 per cent of respondents say their travel departments are not asked to report on travel-generated carbon emissions.

"This is because few self-booking tools providing a reporting capability in this field exist, and because measuring the entire door-to-door travel process is nearly impossible," the ACTE/KDS report claims. "Current reports are usually limited to the air and rail portions of carbon emissions. Incorporating ground transportation plus hotel stays into the trip's total carbon emission report is quite difficult and subject to interpretation."

And while companies do seem to be acknowledging their wider corporate social responsibilities, ACTE executive director Susan Gurley says: "Under present economic conditions, green travel choices may frequently conflict with the greater urge to cut costs."

KDS chief executive Yves Weisselberger adds: "At this stage, green travel choices remain scarce and are usually more expensive. In the current economy, paying a premium is hard to justify, so green business travel will lose out."

At which point it is worth noting the views of Bill Joss, chairman of Cats Solutions, a managed print services provider.

Writing for a wider procurement audience, Joss says: "During a period of economic recession such as the one we have now entered, many organisations which have stated publicly that they have a 'green' agenda are going to fail to drive these through as financial, resource and trading pressures build. Somehow these initiatives will fall off the radar in the face of the ever-increasing need to deliver with less resource and lower budgets.

"The green shoots of environmental responsibility will shrivel as budgetary and operational pragmatism bites, and there will be even less scrutiny over who has - and who has not - delivered on real, tangible environmental actions such as the reduction of carbon emission, recycling and energy saving."

Corporate social responsibility, which is the overall catch-all for environmental awareness in an organisation, is something that must be consistent and all-pervasive if it is going to be effective and become deeply embedded in an organisation's psyche, Joss says.

"As long as corporate social responsibility is seen as a voluntary rather than a necessary action in legal terms, many supplier organisations will continue to 'green wash' to attract more business leads, whilst many organisations that have jumped on the green bandwagon in the last couple of years are now finding that their tight budgets are forcing them to put green initiatives on hold," he says. "The danger is that they will cease to include environmental factors as critical in decision-making and will not properly differentiate between suppliers who are genuinely 'green' and those who are not."

JMP's Jonathan Green couldn't agree less. "There is a perception that 'green' and increased costs go hand-in-hand, and I don't subscribe to that view."

He has an ally in Jean Leston, transport policy officer with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). "I think smart companies realise that their economic future depends on being climate smart as well as on being commercially smart," she says. "If you are going to have a future, you will have to plan for a carbon-constrained environment.

"I think at the moment the state of play is that 30 per cent of companies are making radical cuts in their travel budgets. Is this new austerity a flash in the pan, or is it going to result in long-term behaviour change? "We believe that transformational change is possible as a result of this perfect storm of events."

Demographics are working in WWF's favour, too. "You have got top management, who have been championing this idea of travelling less," says Leston. "Then you have a level [of employees] within companies, who are all of a certain age, who have enjoyed the premium travel - they like things the way they are.

"Then you have everybody else, and our analysis is that younger employees are much more likely to get the message. They are more likely to want to spend time with their families rather than on the road.

"The environmental movement is becoming increasingly middle class" - those frugalistas again - "and there is a growing awareness that action has to be taken now. What we used to think was going to happen in our children's lifetimes, or our grandchildren's lifetimes, is happening now - in our own lifetimes."

JMP's Green shares the view that a few business travel diehards are making action more difficult. "Sustainability has to come from board level down, along with ideas coming up from below, but there is a space in the middle - a marzipan layer - that doesn't grasp the opportunities here."

Convincing the denizens of that marzipan layer is no easy task, Leston concedes. "It's very difficult to sell climate change," she admits, "not least because carbon dioxide is invisible - if it was purple, we'd all be doing something about it."

She remains determinedly optimistic, however. "Our [WWF's] belief is that business travel best practice could very much emanate from the UK. We think there is a chance for UK companies to take a real leadership role in how they seek to implement greener policies, and to demonstrate the benefits of doing so."

Green suggests that for that to happen, the role of the travel manager has to change. "If you reduce the number of trips, you reduce costs as well as emissions. But is the travel manager's job to reduce travel? At the moment, I don't think it is - the travel manager's job is to provide a service."

He also advocates a much broader approach to the greening of British business, way beyond mere business travel. "You can't do this taking a silo'd approach. What about where we work, how we work, and how we are enabled to work? We are probably the last generation, for example, to be stupid enough to commute.

"If I was a spaceman and came down to earth between seven and nine in the morning, and saw all these tin cans with one person in each of them - well, I think I'd turn round and go back home."