Consulting firm PwC is restricting its UK partners and directors from flying business class unless traveling on a long haul overnight flight or unless it is “business-critical” to do so.
They say it is for the environment, or rather part of how they’re going to account for reaching their internal ‘net zero target’.
In many cases travel is billed to their clients, so this saves client money not just money for the firm. But the explanation is kind of silly.
- Aviation represents about 4% of emissions worldwide. Commercial aviation is only about half of that (the rest is cargo). And most of that 2% isn’t from business class travel, nor does it change much by sitting in coach.
- U.K. per capita carbon emissions are lower than they have been at any point since 1858.
- We often act as though all flights have the same environmental impact, but that’s not true. It’s about 15% of flying that causes most of the impact, and better data and route planning as well as higher altitude flying can address that.
Choosing coach versus business class doesn’t matter. Choosing flights with high emissions versus routings with low emissions will matter as we better understand which is which.
Matthew Klint of Live and Let’s Fly says that “This is virtue signaling, plain and simple.” I don’t think that’s quite correct. It is privileging a PR formula over real impact and it is change management.
- Firm leadership wants to impose the travel restriction on shorter flights
- They don’t want an employee backlash. Their firm is entirely the talent that makes it up. They want that talent to accept the change, not push back.
- Meanwhile there’s a formula that doesn’t correspond to real environmental impact – CO2 emissions for coach versus business class (when you take up more space on an aircraft, you divide the aircraft’s average assumed emissions by a smaller number) – but is built into a model that lets you project net zero CO2 emissions as a firm and you really want to make that claim so you do what the formula says, not what might have real environmental benefit.
About 12 years ago the oneworld MegaDO frequent flyer trip chartered a Boeing 757 from American Airlines, and gained access to a tour that included time in flight simulators and a water evacuation from an aircraft. The trip raised around $100,000 for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. Whenever the folks organizers were working with at American received pushback internally, they had a simple response. What, you’re not in favor of curing breast cancer?
Employees and partners at PwC are less likely to stand up and stand out pressing for business class travel, “me versus the environment.” They sound selfish and out of step with group values. On the other hand, if the company simply changed the policy, they’d be inviting comparisons to other firms and for employees to internalize this as a pay cut expecting it to be offset elsewhere in their compensation.
This isn’t ‘virtue signaling’ (although it may also carry a publicity benefit) it is ‘internal messaging’ within the firm and it is acting based on bad incentives embedded in a formula in order to get a PR win.
I ultimately don’t have a strong opinion on which employees should fly business class on which trips. If they need to get off of a flight and go straight to a meeting, and the meeting is high value, then being well-rested matters even when it’s not long haul overnight. Business class London – Dubai during the day might be a good example of this. However not everyone needs this every time.
Claiming the basis for decision-making is the environment, rather than to reset employee expectations, is something of a farce. But the ‘compelling business purpose’ exception hints that the underlying reason is to require employees to offer a business justification, rather than presuming business class as a right.
(HT: Paddle Your Own Kanoo)
Why even waste space explaining why this is or is not relevant to carbon emissions? The entire argument of CO2 emissions is the absurd and flawed premise behind the climate change hysteria industry.
Sorry Gary, I agree with Live and Let’s Fly. As a PwC customer and someone who pays their bills it actually makes me less inclined to trust a management team that is willing to make a change so insignificant and pedantic, that makes their employees less well rested and less desirous of travel, all for a quick PR win that will be forgotten as quickly as it’s announced. This will end up as a footnote in some CYA ESG report on page 94 of 182.
This is just a way of cost cutting and improving margins on client projects. As someone working at a competing firm we as an industry are facing cost cuts as clients tighten spend across the board. No one internally is fooled at what is really going on.
Quite frankly, in my experience, a business policy of restricting use of business class unless traveling on a long haul overnight flight or unless it is “business-critical” to do so is fairly common for many companies although the “overnight” aspect is often not present. An 8 to 12 hour flight in steerage severely limits the ability of a long haul business traveler to utilize their time both before and after such flights if they can’t truly comfortably rest (including sleep) during such long flights. People flying business class aren’t doing so for gourmet meals served aboard the aircraft; you can most often get a better meal at either end of the flight at the airport.
To me a bigger problem are companies that allow business class and/or first class travel unconditionally to executives, but totally ban business class for even long haul travel to the rank and file within the company.
PwC will still be flying the same number of managers & VPs in business class, otherwise they will simply jump to another firm.
Its employees are the product and no one is remotely productive on a coach class BA flight where you can’t open a decent notebook pc with a built-in 10 key.
There’s a reason the Big Four firms often schedule key staff up to 3,000 hours annually for hundreds of dollars (or GBP) per hour. No one wants business advice from someone who just arrived via the midnight flight on easyJet.
Before I left DonorPerfect, the policy was pretty simple… Business class to Europe overnight, coach on the way back.
Even I can do coach on the way back… Though AA’s ice cream cart is actually very, very good.
For personal travel? First class now. I got fired, started a new competitor, went nearly broke, and sold it to a bigger competitor.
And coach back is no still ok. But never there when business is on the line, IMO.
Jon
PWC announced layoffs last month, so this policy is just another way to save money. This is just PR spin
You are missing the UK politics in this. Eat the Rich has been reincarnated as Death-to-those-at-the-pointy-end and Death-to-FF. Boris Johnson’s government made the fallacy (that where you sit affects fuel consumption) official government policy. PWC is simply aligning with the received wisdom before the “conservatives” get tossed out for UK’s left. We’ll quite possibly see UK try to outlaw FF reward schemes on similar “logic” before too long. Targetting an ostensibly wealthy minority as your hate figures is good politics in UK. The cost to PWC is in the noise, and client money is irrelevant to them. PWC’s unofficial UK policy is to penalize employees who fail to get a sufficient number of customer complaints about over-billing…