Akamai Technologies' Priscilla Campbell is a BTN 2024 Best Practioner
Best Practitioner: Priscilla Campbell, Akamai Technologies Director of Global Travel & Expense
Best Practice: Enabling internal collaboration in the world of remote work is one of the biggest hills to climb in the post-pandemic business environment. It is a workplace flashpoint in which, as some companies have figured out, travel management has a clear role to play. BTN recognizes Campbell for collaborating with HR and facilities management to understand the geographic challenges of remote employees and then applying travel supplier relationships and industry know-how to establish a critical network of satellite meeting hubs around the globe to serve Akamai Technologies’ highly distributed workforce.
BTN: How is remote work impacting Akamai Technologies?
Campbell: [Akamai] is committed to giving employees the choice of whether they want to work from home or go into the office; of course, most employees are going to want to work from home. It just supports their personal lifestyle. As that became more solidified … there was a wave of travel … and we started to get requests for assistance with putting together team meetings and groups. I initially thought it would fade away—that it was just pent-up demand and it would pass. But I included the trend in one of my reports to our CFO, who is always very interested in travel, as it was building in 2022. We weren’t sure where it would go, but he asked us to start tracking it. So we configured the [booking] tool so we could capture team meeting activity, and we have been looking at it in 2023 and 2024.
What have you found?
Campbell: Well, it’s not fading away. Employees continue to feel the need to collaborate in person in order to be successful in their own roles and to accomplish goals put before their teams. They need at least one, if not two, meetings a year to collaborate, plan and work together. It became more than just “helping out” in terms of the rate at which they were tapping the travel team. So it really has become a part of what we do that was not previously defined.
Is there a strategic transfer of some sort of real estate budget that ultimately will be transferred to a travel or team meetings budget?
Campbell: We haven’t gotten that far yet in terms of really looking at where we are downsizing the real estate footprint and whether or not that gets allocated to [team collaboration] travel. But facilities is getting feedback from employees as office space is taken offline: “Where are we supposed to meet and get together?” Facilities started looking at where clusters of employees exist—and, again, it’s mostly outside of headquarters. It’s more difficult for them to find a place to go. Facilities [saw] a need to find satellite locations where they could meet.
What is the travel part of that?
Campbell: We looked at a 50-mile radius for selecting satellite locations for employees to meet. We anticipate, however, that this may not meet the entire need and there will still be a need for things like hotel meeting spaces and sleeping rooms to supplement the satellite office program. So those conversations with facilities have educated them on our hotel program and how facilities and travel could put the two programs together to create a holistic solution for Akamai employees.
How does that change your view or objectives for hotel sourcing?
Campbell: Normally, our foundation for sourcing was where our offices were located, but it’s not [like] that so much anymore. We still have our top 10 cities, but we are starting to see some of the patterns shift. We work with one hotel chain in particular, a very large one, that has been very supportive at the national account level. They’ve also been helpful in pulling in the local hotel sales managers to support some of the activity starting to take shape. It creates a new dialogue, [and] it’s definitely opening doors to new opportunities with hotels that we would've never had either a need to work with previously or had that opportunity to have a conversation about how we could work together.
In terms of putting policy around these types of collaboration meetings, what is the goal? Meetings have not been in your remit—do you expect to take on more?
Campbell: We're looking at how we can formalize things a little bit more. We want to be somewhat cautious too, around putting too many rules around it. But it does make sense to provide employee guidance on where and how they should be thinking about getting together and keeping it cost-effective. We're very budget-minded at Akamai, and travel is a highly controllable area. So where you have these meetings [and] how frequently you have these meetings—this has to have some guardrails around it. We also want to create equity across different team collaboration meetings, so teams aren’t getting different experiences.
In terms of taking on more meetings … I don’t think so. Remote team collaboration is evolving need that didn’t have a home, and it is more related to travel than, say, something our marketing team would take on. The marketing team handles Akamai’s big meetings—the group and customer-facing events—and this isn’t that.