Travel Time Policies Around the World
I’ve been traveling quite a bit lately for both customer and company promotion activities. You may not think this is odd, but TOP Step is a virtual company and we pride ourselves on being able to effectively communicate with our customers remotely whenever possible. Saves on travel costs and makes people more productive, in my humble opinion. There are times when it is best to work with customers face-to-face, usually these are workshops or classroom training sessions where concepts are best exchanged by picking up on attendee body language, facial expressions, or even dynamic wipe-board drawings to illustrate a point. And what about those company promotions such as speaking engagements? I’ve actually attended a conference where a speaker used Skype to present. The connection was decent and his topic was good, but you could tell he couldn’t see the audience which makes the audience feel like they’re not really participating – rather spying on the guy in his computer room. And do you know how hard it is to look directly at the webcam vs. downward to read your presentation material? You always look like you’re looking away instead of at the audience. And worse would be those head-mounted cameras they use on some reality shows that keep your face immobile but the rest of the world jostles around you. Those freak me out, I’m just sayin.
So travel is inevitable and I got to thinking about all of the travel policies I’ve encountered in my lifetime. Some very intricate ones and some very simple ones. TOP Step has a simple approach – if you travel, record your travel time against an internal project. I don’t like to jeopardize my team’s work week just because they have to travel for work, but at the same time I don’t believe in recording the travel time to a specific client engagement. This is usually a big decision for a company that needs to be consistent. Do you record travel time to the client engagement or an internal project? Realize that recording travel time effectively is a cost and having this cost hit a client engagement you are impacting profitability. Do you adjust your billing according to a client’s location? Do you bill for travel time? These are, of course, considerations. The fact that a client pays travel expenses is already an extra charge the client is incurring due to the need to have you onsite. There was a time when travel time was an extra reduced hourly fee – primarily for client’s demanding on-site work vs. our engagement needing it. I rarely run into client on-site demands anymore so charging for travel time has gone by the wayside.
It’s in my best interest to track travel time in general so I can see if we have team members in the right geographic locations to effectively cover the National and Global footprint we’ve established over the past years. My travel time policy is record all time traveling when you leave for the airport to when you get to the hotel (or back home). If you work at all during your travels, then this is working time recorded as appropriate and you subtract that from your travel time. Working during travel is encouraged, especially if you are traveling during a working day during prime hours.
I have, though, encountered some other unique travel time recording policies. Here are just a few
1) You may record travel time to offices provided you start at an office and travel to another office. If you travel directly from your home location or hotel to an office, this travel time is personal time and not recordable on timesheets. Fair enough I think since this example pertained to a company with offices in multiple cities within driving distance in the same state.
2) As part of the company onboarding process, a new hire must submit the distance and time traveled to the company’s home office each day. When traveling to another office or client site, the time/distance traveled to the home office must be subtracted from the overall trip total as an adjustment to normal travel distances incurred personally. This was the most intricate and difficult to manage in my view. You have to consider when people move, traffic patterns, and so forth. Conceptually I can see why a company would come up with this, but it seems like it is hard to keep current.
3) You may record travel time at a 50% billable rate when traveling distances of more than 7 hours. This policy was primarily meant for US/EMEA flight travel but ended up also applying to train travel from DC to Boston and car travel from DC to NY!
Travel time is something that must be handled by each company. If your team travels a lot, it is a much bigger topic than those companies that rarely have employees travel or only have executives and sales teams travel. If you choose to record travel time to customer projects, consider the impact to profitability and your overall goals in reporting on project level or customer level profitability. You may find that recording travel is more of a user or internal based measurement than client based measurement after all, I’m just sayin.
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