Many take business trips to get away from the office

A new Telia survey indicates that five percent of employees at companies with 50-99 employees "escape from the office" when they travel on business. At smaller and larger companies, only one percent name "escaping" as their primary reason for taking business trips.

Employees at companies with less than 10 employees travel more often on business than employees at larger companies, but only an extremely small percentage travel to get away from the office.

According to Telia's survey, the nature of the meeting is usually the determining factor for when Swedes choose to take a business trip. However, people who travel because they "want to get away from the office" take thousands of unnecessary business trips each year.

"Trips that are taken only so employees can get away from their workplaces are unnecessarily harmful to the environment. It is up to the employer to create a workplace where the employees want to be," says Erik Hallberg, head of Broadband Services at TeliaSonera in Sweden.

The number of business trips is continuing to increase and 30 percent of the participants in the survey believe that they will travel more during the coming year.

"Since business travel appears to be increasing, we must try to decrease the number of unnecessary trips. At Telia, we have successfully decreased the number of business trips by 30 percent since we are intentionally using modern technology instead of physical meetings whenever possible," says Erik Hallberg.

In Telia’s survey, 1,710 people at companies throughout Sweden answered questions about their business travel. The companies vary in size from less than 10 to more than 500 employees. All of the participants are employees at companies that are Telia customers. The survey was conducted May 16-24.