Hanging pigs, angry cats, & fake plants: loving, hating, and coping with business travel

Internal Auditor, June, 1997 by Sally Dix

Since travel exacts such a significant financial investment, the company and the travelling auditor should insist on the best return possible, both on a professional and personal level. Extracting a few tips from the travel warriors featured in this section may help to tame the savage travel beast.

The Life of a Traveler

AirTouch Communications, Inc., is a global wireless communications company headquartered in California. We currently do business in twelve countries: Belgium, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, South Korea, Spare, and the United States. Even in this dispersed environment, Auditing Services remains a corporate function; all internal controls, acquisition/divestiture due diligence, and business controls consulting is performed for the entire family of AirTouch wholly-owned companies and joint ventures by our small staff located at One California Street in San Francisco.

Stretching our small staff of eight senior internal auditors and one director across this global organization is, as you can imagine, quite a feat. Since most of AirTouch's significant operations are located outside the San Francisco Bay Area, we generally need to get on a plane to interact with business managers in their local environments. We travel extensively.

Most of our projects, where travel outside the Bay Area is involved, require about three weeks of field work. These projects are performed by teams of anywhere from two to six auditors. I join the team for the final few days so that we can finish-in-the-field, which means we go into the exit meeting on the last day of field work with a final draft of the report. We target issuing the report within about a week of returning to the office.

If the job is in Southern California, or in some other fairly close destinations within the U.S., team members generally return home for the weekends. If the job is in Europe or Asia or on the East Coast of the U.S., team members do not return home on weekends. The job posting for openings in our group states that we travel 50-60 percent of the time; on average I believe that is true. In any given quarter individuals may travel more or less than the average.

To cope with our business lifestyle, our auditors need to be intelligent and eager to learn about the company's big picture; adventurers with high energy and capable of keeping an open attitude about the challenges of travel; and, above all else, flexible. Most of us love the travel aspect of the job. All of us get tired of business travel now and then.

I recently invited our entire Auditing Services team, along with a few recent exports from our department, to engage in a two-hour brainstorming session on business travel. We focused on the best and worst of our travel-heavy jobs and shared individual coping strategies. This is how one audit team feels about its travel demands.

Pluses of Job Related Travel

Because we generally accentuate the positive in this group, we decided to start with the benefits of business travel. In interviews with prospective team members, I often use these points to illustrate the positives about joining AirTouch Auditing Services. I must admit that in the brainstorming session I learned a few nuances that I would not emphasize in an interview, but this is how my team feels about the pluses of our travel.

Challenges of a Travel-heavy Job

Many of our negatives emphasize the strain on personal lives and relationships that results from spending so much time away from home. The "downers" of physical inconveniences and too much togetherness seem to come and go, but making personal relationships back home work really takes extra effort.

In a high travel job like this one, people generally are able to make the personal life aspect work for a period of time; but three years appears to be just about the outer limit. At that point it's usually time to move back to something closer to home and more conventional. Other audit departments thinking about adding more travel time to their function must be honest with themselves and their team about how taxing heavy travel can be.

Coping Strategies

There are no magic solutions for the challenges of heavy travel, but a concerted effort to find the positives in the experience helps. Our team has found attitude and planning to be very important coping mechanisms.

A Director's Perspective

Probably the biggest challenge in managing a team that must travel often lies in the stress on personal lives and relationships. That's why I encourage our team members to bring along spouses or significant others when their schedules permit. Often tacking on a week's vacation at the beginning or the end of an international assignment can be a nice way of including friends and family in a positive experience and reducing the loneliness of separation. If personal lives begin to show wear and tear that is not solvable with time off for a vacation, I know it's time to find another career opportunity for the individual.

To manage a team with this kind of "personal" cost/benefit, one must be clear about the travel requirements when interviewing job candidates. I try to emphasize the high percentage of travel assignments in my interview, which is the candidate's first meeting with our group. Then, we invite people back to meet team members who, in informal group settings, also candidly answer questions about the travel travel element of the job and volunteer "war stories." We try hard to get across that it isn't always "glamorous." We also try to look for people who have traveled on their own. In the case of individuals who enjoy vacation travel, it's important to communicate that our travel is not always like what someone experiences on a vacation.