Want to support your employees’ wanderlust of travel? Perfect. Travel helps employees recharge, disconnect, and enter the workplace with new motivation. In fact, offering paid leave or a travel stipend can boost employee engagement up to 60%. Whether you’re building a paid leave program from scratch, already have one, or are looking to support employee travel for ‘bleisure’ (business travel, bookended with leisure travel) or free time travel; it’s essential to create an employee travel stipend policy to support your team. This policy helps you to set clear expectations, improve talent retention, and be at the forefront of employee benefits. Here’s a quick guide on what this policy should contain, including types of personal expenses like per diem allowance, your reimbursement policy, tax laws, and more.
What does a travel stipend mean? A travel stipend is a sum of money paid at regular intervals to support employees with personal travel expenses. This type of stipend is not meant to cover all expenses of an Special Data
employee’s trip, it’s meant to ease the burden and contribute toward it in some way. What is a travel stipend policy? A travel stipend policy is also known as a vacation stipend policy, travel reimbursement policy, or leisure travel policy. It generally outlines the rules and regulations for employees to use the company-allotted stipend for personal travel expenses. Employees have the freedom to spend this fund for vacation at their discretion during a calendar year. Since no federal or state laws require companies to offer a personal travel stipend, you can easily create policies of your own.
Some companies prefer to start small and gradually build their travel stipend program to offer maximum amounts through their stipends. Others prefer to go all-in from day one—this article should help you decide what’s the best fit for your business. What are the benefits of offering employee stipends? Offering employee stipends for vacation creates a win-win situation for you and your employees. It’s a method to keep them motivated and satisfied with their role knowing their workday is contributing to more than just their salary. Some businesses, especially early-stage self-funded startups, can be deterred from offering a travel stipend policy. It screams extra costs, and founders often expect covering travel expenses of employees to be out of reach.