The lowdown on corporate travel incentive programs
As they lead a team, entrepreneurs soon realize how important it is to recognize and reward their workers so they stay committed, loyal, and productive.
There are many ways to acknowledge your staff members, such as giving them bonuses and gifts, perks such as free meals or massages, and in-person thanks.
However, you might like to go a step further by starting a corporate travel incentive program in your business. Here’s what you need to know to get the ball rolling.
What is a corporate travel incentive program?
Many businesses offer a trip away to reward employees for accomplishing a goal or achieving something special. A corporate travel incentive program is set up to incentivize workers to be more productive and focused. It’s similar to bonuses or other motivational tactics that often get used in organizations.
The program can include any travel incentive, such as nights away in a hotel for individuals, company trips for whole teams, a day tour away from the city, or tickets to a show, among other things. Businesses incentivize various types of goals, too. For instance, they might offer a reward if staff members sign up a certain number of new customers, achieve a set sales value, complete a project launch in time, or come up with the best idea to solve a significant business problem.
Benefits of corporate travel incentive programs
There are many reasons to consider implementing a corporate travel incentive program in your venture. For example, employees benefit from feeling seen, valued, and appreciated and get to focus on the sense of achievement they create from winning the reward or being recognized for their hard work in another way.
They also have a break away to recharge, get to see somewhere new and might make wonderful memories with a family member, friend, or with colleagues if the trip is a shared experience. Thinking about the adventure they’ve been awarded gives people something to look forward to and be excited by, too.
For the company, corporate travel incentive programs work well because they motivate employees to work harder and, in many cases, to work better together. They can increase the loyalty and commitment of the team and motivate the team members who don’t win a trip to try harder for a future incentive opportunity. Staff members are also more likely to have much higher job satisfaction and stay with the company longer.
If trips involve teams going together, this can boost morale and allow workers to share ideas and bond more. In turn, this will help increase future results. Communication and collaboration can both rise substantially with the use of these travel programs. Initiate an incentive plan in your business, and you may find that you’re more able to draw top talent to your workforce because current employees talk favorably about their employer. Plus, many incentive trips are posted on social media, so others see these positive images and comments, and your brand can be enhanced and valued more highly.
Tips for setting a program up
If you’re ready to set up an incentive program for your team(s) soon, you can make it more likely to succeed if you follow a few tips. Start by working out your goals for the program. You may have specific ideas of things you’d like your team to work towards, or you may want to brainstorm some options for the coming year or two.
Keep in mind that you’ll want to update workers on their progress toward goals once you launch an incentive competition or let people know that you’re planning to award the prize to the person who impresses the most in some other way. Establishing clear goals will help you stay on track with programs and make it easier to identify and assess your return on investment.
Before you get too far down the path of organizing corporate travel management plans, ask your staff for feedback. Rather than making all the decisions about where you’ll offer trips to and other details, talk to your workforce about where they might want to go, which activities might appeal to them, the types of accommodation they prefer, and so on.
Your employees may also have ideas about useful travel resources you can turn to or discount or loyalty programs you might utilize. It’s helpful to distribute a survey to your staff and use the feedback to plan trips, or you could have a meeting and garner input there while also allowing people to submit suggestions at a later time.
Other tips to remember are to ensure you pick the right corporate travel management firm if you want to outsource finding and booking vendors, and set budgets for each program so you don’t accidentally spend more than you should. Provide clear guidelines to staff about how the programs work, including the end dates for picking winners, too.
When done right, corporate travel incentive programs can offer a lot to a business, so start thinking about how you might introduce one in the coming months in your organization.
