What you’ll learn in this article:
- The benefits of employees sticking to a business travel policy
- Essential tips on improving policy compliance
- Why employee engagement is key to a policy’s success
You followed the essential steps to creating a travel policy, you’ve received buy in from the company’s stakeholders. Now how can you ensure your travelling employees stick to these set guidelines? Check out these strategies to boost business travel policy compliance.
Why is travel policy compliance important?
A clear travel policy can help an organisation keep on top of expenses and budgets, monitor cost-savings and sustainability reporting and keep travellers safe and secure when they’re travelling for business. And having a really good travel policy helps employees feel valued, a key benefit to retaining and recruiting talent.
To encourage employees to adhere to that policy, if it’s clear what’s within, it helps people make the right travel decisions.
Follow these top tips on how to improve travel policy compliance and prevent leakage of your travel programme.
- Keep it clear and concise
People like to know what they can or cannot do when they travel for business. A clear policy guides people to make the right choices to meet the company policy and objectives.
- Review the language used
Use language that suits your business’ company culture. And gentler language around the set guidelines such as ‘consider’ or ‘review’, rather than ‘you must’, can be more effective for compliance. The language can be reviewed on an ongoing basis.
- Consider all employees’ needs
Ensure the policy truly reflects the needs of your travellers. Are there sections required that apply to staff seniority? Are there policy guidelines that reflect the needs of your female travellers, your LGBTQ+ travellers with visible and hidden disabilities? With a global policy, it is important to incorporate local nuances. Reducing stress for travellers is essential for employee wellbeing.
- Regularly communicate where to find the policy
While you can host the more in-depth policy on the company intranet, consider displaying the key benefits of adhering to the policy in an appealing way, whether that’s physical posters, email alerts or via Teams channels. And a clear link to an FAQs document can help travellers directly.
Working with a TMC? Ensure the policy is readily available in its online booking technology.
- Incentivise your travellers
If your data shows that a high number of employees book outside of policy, consider incentives to encourage take up. It can be tailored to what the company regards as realistic – whether it’s financial incentives or gamification.
- Ask for feedback
Regular reviews of your travel policy are paramount. Hotel, flight and ground transportation prices fluctuate for a variety of reasons at different points of the year. If your employees can see the company is aware of the current travel landscape and reflects that in its travel policy, it can help promote compliance.
Mail hello@reedmackay.com to discuss all of your corporate travel and event management needs.
