Travel planning for employers

Helping business and employers make the right travel choices

Encouraging sustainable travel for employees to and from the workplace, and how customers and visitors get to you, can play an important part in meeting Greater Manchester’s ambitious target for becoming carbon neutral by 2038. It also has tangible benefits for your business and your workforce:

• Productivity – preventing a return to pre-pandemic congestion levels, which cost the GM economy £1.3bn each year
• Sustainability – support a thriving Greater Manchester economy whilst delivering on your corporate environmental aims
• Health and wellbeing – encouraging active travel (including walking, jogging and cycling) as part of the commute and travelling at different times in support work-life balance
• Unlocking – the wider benefits of in-person working while protecting the environment
• Our business travel portal has a wide range of advice and resources to help you and your teams make the right sustainable travel choices, including:
• Practical tools and resources such as the business commuter toolkit and a downloadable employee travel guide
• Active travel provision and support, from information on GM’s cycle hire scheme to cycle parking guidance for your business
• Information on public transport services and flexible ticketing offers for businesses
• One-to-one support through the live chat

Business Commuter Toolkit

The Business Commuter Toolkit is a set of practical resources - developed in partnership with Local Authorities, the Growth Company and informed by feedback from GM businesses - to support employers to set out and understand:

• Travel opportunities presented at a business site
• Employees’ travel habits and willingness for more sustainable ways of commuting
• Incentives and schemes to encourage sustainable travel
• Organisational travel goals and strategies to meet them

Embedding smarter, more sustainable means of commuting can have tangible health, wellbeing and productivity benefits for your business and workforce. Assessing the current impact and future aims of travel to and from your site(s) can contribute considerably to your organisation’s wider corporate sustainability as well as working towards GM’s net-zero ambitions.

Developing a travel plan can be an effective tool to increase the accessibility of employees traveling to a site, particularly by sustainable modes. By building up a picture of how your business site, culture and policies enable walking, cycling, public transport and other travel modes, can help identify areas for improvement that are realistic and achievable for you and your employees.

Using the toolkit

The following resources are available to download below. These are recommended for medium-sized businesses with around 50 employees or more, who may be considering how to make commuting more sustainable across the workforce.

Smaller businesses may want to consider sharing our Employee journey planning guide. This will support employees to plan their commute considering sustainable options at an individual level.

It is recommended that the resources are completed in the order listed. This will help to ensure any staff surveys are rooted in the most viable travel options available to and from your business site and consider any organisational schemes you are interested in engaging on. These resources include:

1.Site Audit
Conduct a site audit to identify and analyse the travel opportunities near to your site. This will help you to understand viable options for sustainable travel and focus on what is achievable for your employees.

2.Culture survey
Consider company policies, initiatives and schemes that could be put in place to encourage sustainable travelling. This resource will provide you with ideas for how your organisational culture can help support your employees to travel differently.

3.Staff survey
Survey your employees travel choices to understand current commuting practices, and their aspirations, opportunities, and challenges for choosing more sustainable options. This will help you develop your travel plan by gauging the appetite for travelling sustainably, and how to support your employees overcome obstacles to doing so.

4.Travel action plan
Bring your site audit, culture survey and staff survey together to develop an action plan. Define your goals for employee travel based on the knowledge you have gathered and put strategies in place to reach them. You can share information with colleagues to help take them on their journey with you.

We would welcome your feedback on the Business Portal and Business Travel Planner. If you have any comments, queries or suggestions, please contact engagement@tfgm.com.