Faith in the workplace: Giving your employees autonomy without sacrificing policy control.
Your administrative team puts a lot of work into creating a travel policy. And when your employees go outside the designated booking channels, they create more work for themselves, and undercut the time your admin teams spends trying to make a streamlined solution for the company.
Why do employees go outside the designated policies? Simple: the policies are buried in a company wiki, or has been long recycled along with all other onboarding materials. Travel policies aren’t something that most employees have to contend with. As a result, they are terribly inaccessible. Throw that into a mix of a tight deadline, unbooked flights, and last-minute changes to a schedule… well, you can understand why an employee might throw policy into the wind in their booking-frenzy.
Lots of companies are approaching this as a problem of motivation. They assume that employees would be more conscientious of the company policy if it was something in it for them. A prize. Gamifying the company policy. But such prizes don’t really solve the issue at hand: a lack of time. When push comes to shove, an employee in a time crunch is going to go for the flight, not the prize points. Instead of rewarding employees for “good behavior,” why not create opportunities for employees to engage with policy in an automated, sensible way?
Some readers might be shaking their heads.
“Incentive programs are the only way to get employees to do what we expect of them!”
I don’t think that’s true. Travelling employees are typically high-performing, revenue generators across sales, business development and customer success. Increasingly, these roles are also filled by millennials: a generation hallmarked by their commitments to technology and results. High-performers typically care about their company, and if they can contribute positively, they want to know how to do it. Incentive programs offer rewards, sure, but when push comes to shove, most people aren’t going to be consistently motivated by gift certificates to Bed, Bath, and Beyond.
What are employees–especially millennial employees–really motivated by? Autonomy. And frankly, the way that a lot of travel policies are set up really discourages that. Having a team responsible for overseeing administrative policy doesn’t meant your employee can’t function without them: rather, the policy should also allow the employee to adapt the trip to his or her requirements. And the policy needs to adopt right back. Bringing automation to travel policy means that employees can regularly interact and become familiar with the policies they are responsible for.
We’re obviously biased: Trippeo’s program trusts in the end-user. We’ve created a product that values intelligence and planning over prizes. When you empower your employees to make positive contributions to your company on a timeframe that works for them, you build a stronger company foundation. And who doesn’t want a workforce that can work within policies, independently?
If you’re not convinced, we’d included a few different travel templates for you below. Or, you could try Trippeo for 30 days free. See what freedom feels like: give Trippeo a shot.
