While business traveler tracking is not a new process to those in global mobility, not all organizations have a clear-cut approach on how to handle the tracking process for their remote employees. As COVID-19 spread across the globe and countries were forced to shut down their travel, the need to mitigate risk and maintain location-based compliance for remote workers reached a new high for a majority of businesses.

In a recent poll conducted by Concur/Wakefield, 96% of organizations stated they were not fully prepared to manage talent and travel during COVID-19, while more than 70% expected to have an active remote-working policy in place by the end of 2020.

In our recent webinar on the Evolution of Business-traveler and Remote-worker Tracking in a Post-COVID World, Altair Global’s senior vice president of Financial Services, Susan Myers, noted a significant amount of discussions with companies regarding the risk that comes from not having adequate tracking solutions for business travelers or remote workers.

“The universal learning has been there is not a quick solution to building the right framework for any organization and there is much work to be done considering the pace of change in this area,” said Myers.

One major change of pace is the lessening of COVID restrictions across the globe. This raises questions for how best to know where employees are at a given time as they work remotely and how to track business travelers as travel opens back up. In fact, in this same webinar, just over half of registrants polled answered that they have plans to continue or expand their remote work policies, while 34% of registrants admitted that they do not currently track their business travelers and/or remote workers.

As explained by Tom Crosby, director of Consulting Services from Tracker Software Technologies, one solution to the tracking problem is to work internally to integrate the various stakeholder groups (travel, mobility, HR, etc.) into one cohesive team. Ideally, this team could collaborate, allowing implementation of any possible solution, like Altair’s ORBIT location-based compliance tool, to be executed quickly and to better gather information from travelers to meet the needs of all groups. The end result of internal collaboration between groups being that there would no longer be a need for the employee to perform multiple data entries or visit numerous portals.

As COVID-19 (hopefully) winds down and leaves us with much more prevalent remote working policies, organizations will need to focus more on location-based compliance, duty of care and mental health considerations. While companies have often treated business traveler and remote worker processes separately, bringing these two groups together can highlight the impact they have and allow more forward-thinking policies to govern employee movement before compliance events occur.

COVID-19 has had irreversible impacts on business travel and also introduced the importance of remote worker tracking. Learn more about the Altair Global ORBIT solution, trends to watch for in a post-COVID travel world and how to get your organization ahead of the curve in our latest on-demand webinar.