How often do you misbehave on business trips? (Image: Natla Kolava/Flickr)
Be honest: Have you ever done something you’re not proud of while away on business — the kind of thing that you really, really regretted the morning after?
Hey, we’re not judging. And you’re not alone. A new survey of 1,000 business travelers found that 27 percent of them (33 percent of men, 24 percent of women) admitted to binge drinking while out of town on business. And 11 percent (14 percent of men, eight percent of women) said they had picked up a stranger in a bar on a business trip. (Two percent of men said they do that on every one of their trips.)
The survey was conducted by On Call International, a provider of customized travel risk management services to corporations — i.e., making sure employees stay safe when they’re traveling on business. (This is a growth industry; a legal principle called “duty of care” has been cited by courts in holding companies liable for the safety and well-being of their traveling employees.)
Perhaps it’s not surprising that eight percent of the survey respondents said they had lied to their bosses about their misadventures on the road. And four percent, the survey found, had been detained by the police.
The safety risks of binge drinking in a strange city are obvious. As for the other thing, “While it certainly appears that the allure of a one night stand without the constraints of being close to home is tempting to many business travelers, letting one’s guard down in an unfamiliar setting can easily lead to dangerous situations for an individual. This includes assault, robbery and otherwise avoidable accidents leading to serious bodily injury – not to mention reputational damage for the employer,” said Jim Hutton, Chief Security Officer at On Call International.
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Recall that some of the Secret Service agents got caught with their pants down in South America. http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/secret-service-scandal-colombian-woman-describes-night-of-carousing-with-agents/2012/05/04/gIQAcwyi1T_story.html
Sounds like a pretty awesome job
Once upon a time while interviewing for a job that would be about 75% travel, the hiring manager mentioned very matter-of-factly that their single male employees rarely expense hotels, as they would “make friends” everywhere they went. The women were exempt from this implied cost-saving requirement and could stay wherever they wanted for “safety.” I opted to join another company. The funny thing (I guess you could call it karma) is that a couple of years later, they discovered that one of their employees, married to someone who did the same job for a competing company, was billing all hotel and meal costs to this company, while the spouse billed all of the exact same charges to the other company. It helped that they shared the same first initial (and last name, of course).
The percentages are still pretty small if accurate.
Sad but not surprising. My guess is many more drink by themselves in lonely hotel rooms watching porn but maybe that’s safer than getting an STD that they take home to the spouse.
William wakes with his clothes on.
The morning call has been and gone,
And he might not make the flight but he will try.
Bit by bit it comes back to him,
A bunch of Belgian business men
And a strange drinking game, oh God why?
I 2nd that!
so.. is your position vacant?
This is hardly surprising. I used to work for a major international consulting firm and I was horrified by the amount of booze that was pushed on employees, clients, and prospective clients. I was actually yelled at for eating lunch at my desk every day. They demanded that I spend my lunch hours taking clients and prospective clients to lunch and spending as much money as possible on alcohol, which was hard because I don’t drink. On business trips I was expected to spend every single night in bars or clubs with clients, loosening them up with alcohol and getting them comfortable with the idea of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on my firm’s services. My employer spent mountains of money on booze, extravagant golf events, tickets for blockbuster sporting events, you name it. It was the devil’s playground, and the customers wallowed in it and went wild. One time a customer (from what I was told) ran up a $10,000 tab at a bar that offered lap dances and bottles of champagne at fantastically inflated prices, and my employer reportedly paid it. I wonder how that expense was presented to the financial auditors.
I lasted about nine months, quit, and never looked back.