Business travel is a must for many companies, but if you’re a manager, there’s a good chance you’re looking for some tips on how to make business travel easier for your employees.
While business travel isn’t always the most enjoyable, it should be safe and comfortable. After all, this can make a big difference in your employees’ productivity.
Here are some measures that can be put in place to make sure business travel is safe, productive, and perhaps even enjoyable for all of your employees.
Aside from taking the trip for them, these five tips are the best ways to make business travel easier for all of your employees.
Provide Travel Insurance
Offering your employees travel insurance is one of the best things you can do to care for them while they’re on the road. Travel insurance will cover your employees in the event of an emergency (like a natural disaster while they’re on the road, a motor vehicle accident, or even a medical emergency).
Offer a Per Diem
Another step to take is to offer a per diem. Also known as a day rate, this is a fixed amount of reimbursement paid to employees for daily meals, lodging, and incidental expenses. If the per diem is $100 per day, for example, your workers will receive $100 for every day they travel.
Give Them a Contact List
Provide your employees with a contact list of people to get in touch with should there be any problems while they are on the road. These should be people to call if they have a medical emergency, run into a snafu at the airport, or even just have questions that are work-related while they’re on the road.
Make sure your employees always have someone to get in touch with – even in the late hours of night or the wee hours of the morning. There’s nothing worse than being in a forein country on business and feeling like you’re all alone with nobody to turn to for help if there’s an emergency.
Take Advantage of Online Booking Tools
In our modern age of technology, there’s no reason why business travel has to be tedious. In fact, booking and planning a trip should be easier than ever.
TravelPerk is one such online booking tool that your employees might find useful. With this app, your employees can access everything from airline reservations, hotels, train depots, and more. It tracks bookings and makes producing expense reports incredibly easy.
Another example is TravelBank. It’s similar to TravelPerk in that everything is centralized, allowing you to book all of your travel in one place. It also has features to help automate the expense report process – a tedious task that is perhaps the worst part of business travel for most of your employees!
TravelBank also has a fun feature that lets individual travelers earn rewards, particularly if they’re able to find ways to save the host company (ie, you) some money. You both win!
Give Them Some Flexibility to Enjoy the Trip
As a business owner, it’s sometimes easy to view your employees as automatons. This isn’t necessarily something you do on purpose – chances are, you recognize that your employees are human and want to do right by them – but instead, employee comfort is often sacrificed simply by a matter of mistake.
When you book travel for your employees, make sure you recognize their “humanness” and give them time to unwind. Allow your employees to add a few leisure days to the itinerary or to schedule flights so that they don’t interfere too much with their sleep.
Encourage them to take nonstop flights and, if they do have to have layovers, offer them airport lounge passes.
Even having your travelers go on a “digital detox” when they’re traveling – in which they don’t respond to work-related communications after a certain hour – can work wonders for their mental state. By giving your employees some time to unwind and explore the destination they’re in, they’re more likely to give the business meetings and other work-related obligations their all when they get back at it the next morning.
A Final Note
Although some of the items listed above can be a bit expensive, remember – the happier your current employees are on the road, the less likely it is that you’ll have to hire replacements later on.
Don’t step over a dollar to save a dime – follow these tips to make business travel easier for your employees, and your bottom line will be all the stronger.
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