1. Health and Safety
As an organization, you have a responsibility and duty of care to your employees. If your crew is required to travel as part of their regular duties and work, you are responsible to ensure they have access to decent, secure, and clean accommodations and travel. You can achieve this by managing travel centrally so that you are certain of accommodation standards, process compliance and you know where your teams are. You can also give your crews per diems or living out allowances that they can use to manage their own way. This gives your workforce a choice in how/where they want to spend their travel funds, but you could risk them utilizing substandard accommodations or other substitutes in order to retain as much cash as possible. Alternatively, you can give them a food allowance and still direct them to book travel with preferred vendors, which balances flexibility and freedom with oversight and regulation.
2. Administration
You want to ensure whatever policies you decide to put in place are easily managed. Creating a plan that is nearly perfect, but a nightmare to manage will not be successful. Does your accounts payable team have hours to spend collecting folios from different hotels? Will you need to train your crew on how to submit expenses for each of their stays? How do you make sure the cost of accommodations is recovered on project specific travel needs? Think through all the stakeholders involved, look at the downstream effects and consider the impacts to each group before coming to a conclusion. Inefficiencies in administrative efforts can prove to be more costly and time consuming without travel policy guidelines.
3. Reasonable Expenses
Everyone may have different opinions on what is reasonable or typical when it comes to travel and is often colored by their own personal preferences and experiences. Executives going on long-haul flights may fly business class as the standard, but does that apply across your whole organization? If your team is at a property for an extended-stay do you cover purchases at the commissary and weekly laundry fees? Whatever your organization decides to do, what is (and isn’t) covered as part of reasonable expenses needs to be crystal clear in order to avoid confusion and misconceptions.
4. Responsibility
Once you determine all the stakeholders, you’ll have to assign certain tasks to each group and determine who will be responsible for which duties. Will you book your workforce travel centrally through HR, dispatchers or a dedicated travel desk? Do you want your crews reserving their own individual travel to give them more flexibility? Who will track your travel and accommodations spend and what tools can they use to make sure your travel policies are followed? Confirming you have the right accountabilities in place will ensure that everyone is on the same page, aware of what they need to do, and that your true travel costs have been accounted for.
5. Education and Communication
When you’ve finalized your travel policy, the roll out to your organization is key in the success and adoption of the program. Ensure all executives are in agreement prior to communicating. Educate your leadership and management teams on the new policy and provide resources in case they receive questions from their teams. Communicate to all impacted employees through memos, town halls, team meetings, your intranet and anywhere else they can access information. Having a multi-touch and multi-tier approach helps to reiterate the message and educate your team across the board.
