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Travel is a great way to grow your company. Travelling exposes employees to new ideas, cultures, and perspectives on life. It also encourages staff members to work more collaboratively with others in the office since they are all a part of the same team.
However, there are ways that employers can enforce their travel policy to protect the company and its employees.
This guide will explore tips for enforcing your company's travel policy while travelling abroad or domestically.
Communicate Corporate Travel Policies to All Employees
The first step to enforcing your company's travel policy is to ensure that all employees are aware of it. Companies adopt travel policies for a variety of reasons.
This includes security reasons, but you will want everyone who works for your company to be on the same page about what is expected while travelling.
Travel policies should include allowances for meals and laundry, accommodation guidelines, and more. Communicate this information to all of your employees, especially those who travel frequently or on business trips.
Travel policies will vary among companies but should include guidance for entertainment expenses (whether or not they are allowed) and other costs incurred while travelling.
Travel policies can also outline expected behaviours during travel to ensure everyone is on the same page about what behaviour is considered business appropriate.
Use Technology To Help Keep Everyone in Line
Technology can be used to enforce your company's travel policy in several ways. You may have an expense management system for tracking expenses while travelling, or you can use cloud-based travel and expense management systems that will track expenses and help keep everyone safe while abroad.
Ensure all employees who travel are aware of the technology available for them to use while away. Show employees how to submit expenses within the system, and make sure your travelling staff knows what qualifies as an item of appropriate business expenditure.
Conduct Regular Audits
Regularly conducting audits of your employees' travel expenses can effectively ensure they stick with the travel policy. This will ensure that all employees are on the same page about what is considered appropriate business expenditure and will help reduce fraud among staff members.
Audits should be conducted regularly to determine whether or not employees are sticking to the company's travel policy. An excellent way to conduct an audit is to examine charges on an employee's credit card statements, so there is no chance of missing expenses.
Conducting audits will keep employees accountable and ensure they know they can be found out if they are not participating in business-appropriate activities while travelling abroad or domestically.
Measure Compliance and Performance to Determine Effectiveness
To effectively enforce your travel policy, you should measure how well employees adhere to the requirements. This will help you determine if your company's travel policy is fair or not and if it needs adjusting.
You can also use this information to understand better which areas need more attention, for example, by implementing a designated account manager system.
Measure compliance to determine whether or not your company's travel policy effectively reduces risk. You should measure this by the number of violations found and what types of violations are detected.
This will help you understand how well your employees adhere to the travel policy over time, creating a more practical travel policy.
Regularly Review and Update the Policy as Needed
A travel policy needs to be regularly reviewed and updated as required. When your company reviews the policy, it's essential for everyone involved to provide feedback, especially if someone feels like anything is unfair or unjustified.
If changes need to be made, do so before talking about the new policy with employees.
The review process isn't just for updating the policy, though. It helps highlight where weaknesses in the policy are, which is essential to consider if you want your travel policy to be effective at enforcing it.
When changes are made to the policy, they should be circulated through memos, emails, or announcements so everyone knows what the new policy is.
Ensure Your Travel Policy Is Achievable and Reasonable
An achievable travel policy means that it's reasonable to expect employees to follow the rules. It shouldn't be overly complicated or confusing; the easier your company makes it for people, the more willing they follow it.
On top of this, employees shouldn't be given impossible tasks to follow the policy. If something is unrealistic, they most likely won't do it without questioning why they must follow these seemingly unnecessary rules.
When creating a travel policy, provide all employees with clear, concise information. It should be easy to understand and not require much explanation.
Conclusion
A well-crafted and regularly reviewed travel policy is integral to any company. However, it's not enough to have a policy in place - you also need to enforce it.
In this guide, we've outlined some tips on making sure your travel policy is achievable and reasonable for employees while still being effective at enforcing the rules and regulations you've set in place.
