Earlier this year, APG joined the coalition Anders Reizen, a coalition of over fifty big organizations in the Netherlands that want to cut the CO2 emissions of business travel in half by 2030. This ambition and fine-tuning our own ambition with respect to sustainability led us to take a critical look at our current mobility policy in 2020. That’s what APG was doing when the corona crisis broke out and the majority of APG employees started to work from home and stopped traveling altogether.
This will not slow down the development of the new mobility plan, however, but instead, provides new insights that will be incorporated into the plan. Not just for the immediate future, but certainly also in the long run.
Currently there is still a lot of working from home at APG. This is not going to change until September, following the RIVM guidelines. At some point, a period will probably follow where increasingly more employees will start traveling to work again. As a participant of Anders Reizen, APG feels responsible for showing the right example. And that means that APG intends for their employees to travel to work in a healthy, safe and sustainable way, when traveling is permitted again. Limiting and spreading out mobility is the top priority in this.
This is exactly what the members of the coalition have agreed on. This approach will prevent crowding on the road, in public transport and at the office. The participating employees will focus on using their bicycles as a healthy and sustainable alternative. They also agreed to keep air travel to a minimum. It is expected that will be on-going until at least the end of this year.
The majority of the employees involved will be adjusting their mobility policy in response to the corona measures and are looking for a healthy balance between working remotely and meeting at the office. People are asking each other questions like “What will our new way of working and traveling look like?”, “How do we prevent going back to old patterns?” and “Is part of the solution to keep working from home, either completely or partially?” In this way, companies are helping each other to evaluate new experiences with work and travel flexibility and to permanently incorporate them into the new, sustainable normal.
Today, Anders Reizen is launching a media campaign to keep business travel to a minimum, even after the period of intensively working from home is over. To that end, there is an article in the Financieel Dagblad today, in which the Coalition Anders Reizen makes a statement about traveling in compliance with the corona measures.