How to Create a Right Travel & Expense Policy for Your Company

Enterprises create various policies such as IT security policy, HR policy, and more to effectively manage business operations. While creating policies for supporting business continuity, firms often overlook the Travel and Expense (T&E) policy that can highly impact the company’s spending, culture, and overall satisfaction of the employees. The T&E policy-based approach contributes to a whole lot of things that affect the company’s productivity and efficiency.

Cost Management

Enterprises should manage their employees’ business expenses effectively to reduce costs associated and increase efficiency. For any business, T&E makes up for the most considerable expense after employees’ payroll. You can save a lot more money by creating an effective expense policy or modernizing the existing policy and processes.

Employee Satisfaction

While participating in business travels, employees often spend money from their pockets and submit expense reports to claim reimbursements for their travel expenses. Easy expense reporting and quick reimbursement process enhance employee satisfaction and encourage them to deliver more productivity.

Corporate Culture

Every company will have its unique corporate culture that greatly depends on the company’s believes and values. The stakeholders and employees should make sure that the company’s T&E policy matches the corporate culture of the organization. The travel policy you create not only reflects on your corporate culture but also strongly influences the culture you are seeking to evolve into. For instance, the decisions you make to the employees’ travel choices, such as whether the top-tier business travelers fly first-class, what kind of accommodation sales executives should be allowed to book, should employees be required to report their expenses daily, etc. The decisions you make in these aspects reflect your corporate culture and determine the employees’ views on business travels.

Company Image

Businesses should attract and onboard the right talent with the relevant skillset to ensure that a sufficient workforce is available to handle the operations effectively. Employee-friendly policies and generous workplace incentives will improve the company’s image and play a key role in attracting top talent to the organization.

Safety Matters

Employees participate in business travels to help businesses in reaching customers and achieving sales targets. Enterprises should make sure that the employees are safe throughout their business travel. An effective travel policy should include clauses for protecting employees from unforeseen situations.

We have listed a few factors that play a crucial role in determining and implementing the right travel policy for your business.

Budget

Budget is a major factor to consider while creating a travel policy. The finance teams should scale costs and promote an operational economy to ensure that the operations stick to the budget. Contrary, you should also make sure to enhance employee experience throughout the expense management process – from business travel planning to expense reimbursements. Finding the right balance in determining the inclusions and exclusions is key to an effective policy.

flects on your corporate culture but also strongly influences the culture you are seeking to evolve into. For instance, the decisions you make to the employees’ travel choices, such as whether the top-tier business travelers fly first-class, what kind of accommodation should sales executives

Automation & Technology

The uncertainty surrounding the expense management and reimbursement process is a huge pain for almost every business. While participating in business travels, employees pay for expenses from personal money, and they expect reimbursements to have a quick turnaround time. With many companies still relying on manual, paper-based expense management processes, it is difficult for the employees to get reimbursements on-time. Plus, the manual methods of expense reimbursement are more expensive, time-consuming, and less responsive than the automated systems. By adopting and implementing the right expense solution, businesses can streamline the expense management process and boosts employee satisfaction.

Employee Satisfaction

According to Forbes, employee empowerment, loyalty, enthusiasm, and other variables are nailing employee engagement to business success. The majority of the companies are incorporating effective T&E policies and implementing automated expense management software solutions to streamline processes and reward their employees for savings. A few companies are even going mobile and sometimes gamify their travel programs to improve employee engagement and increase productivity.

Communication & Awareness

Even an effective travel policy or advanced expense solution can’t help you achieve your business objectives if proper awareness is not there. Businesses should create an employee-centric travel policy and put the policy at the employee’s fingertips to make sure they understand how they are beneficial from it. For example, you can allow employees to access leader boards to let them track savings, create interactive travel blogs or forums to share tips and tricks with employees, etc. This process makes employees aware of the policy advantages and builds a positive corporate culture across the organization.

With the above points, you have got a basic idea of the importance of travel policy for an organization and various aspects businesses should include in a travel policy. While creating a travel policy, make sure you include the aspects that help both the organization and the business travelers.