Why You Should Encourage Your Employees To Travel More

Everyone knows I love to travel! C’est la vie, as they say. You find out so many new and interesting things when you travel. I love a vacay where I can relax the entire week, but also love one of those fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants crazy go, go, go vacays (hello, New York!). Basically, traveling is a form of escape and new adventure and everyone must experience it throughout the year in some way – whether you’re going far away or just across the state. And if you’re a manager, employee travel is essential and the healthiest way to have a thriving company. If your employees aren’t happy, your business will fail!

Traveling is one of the most rejuvenating and refreshing activities. Exploring new places and visiting new cities, not only broadens the horizons, but also freshens up our minds before we get back to our mundane lives. While employed at a full time job, traveling gives us the break that we need to inspire and rejuvenate ourselves from time to time.

Research and studies have proven that people who travel often, make for really good employees. There are several reasons why traveling can make people good employees and why you should encourage your employees to travel more.

Find out below why you should ask your office employees to travel as much as they can.

De-stress and Refresh

There is no doubt in the fact that traveling helps a person de-stress and refresh. While working in a highly competitive and stressful environment, the mind, body and soul need a break to recharge. Traveling is the perfect way to do that. It exposes you to a completely different environment, brings with it a distinctive set of challenges and educates a person beyond the work related issues. All of these will take the person’s mind away from work.

So, after traveling when a person returns to work, he/she will return with a refreshed mind, which will lead to the employee doing better at work and generating new ideas.

Personal Growth

Traveling opens up a person’s mind and contributes to their personal growth and development. Exposure to new cities, culture, food etc. not only ticks off the travel bucket list of exploring a new place, but also teaches the traveler a thing or two about the different ways of doing things in the world. In the long run, this employee who travels, will be able to bring new ideas, tactics and vision to the workplace, which he/she might have picked up from some different corner of the world.

In fact, owing to this advantage of travelling, many companies conduct travel with their teams as a part of their corporate away days and team building activities, because they understand the long term benefits of making their employees travel.

Decreased Frustration

In the busy lives of a corporate workplace, frustration with work and its challenges are bound to crop up every now and then. This leads to decreased work productivity, poor work-life balance and a higher rate of resignation. Traveling will ensure that your employees are getting the much-needed break from work, are not overburdened by the work pressures and have a higher work productivity by getting back to work after blowing off some steam.

It is important for an employee to experience other challenges and moments in life apart from work, otherwise they might feel trapped in the cycle of a 9-5 work life, without realizing that there is a lot to see and experience outside of their cubicles.

How can you make sure your employees travel more?

Now that we have established how traveling makes for better employees in a workplace, let’s look at how you can ensure that your employees travel more.

The most effective way of making anything happen is creating awareness about it. Educate your employees on why they should travel more and how it’s going to benefit both, their professional and personal lives. What an employee doesn’t know, he/she will not miss. So educate your employees on why they need to travel more.

Once you’ve educated your employees on the benefits of traveling, make time for their travels. Provide your employees with paid vacation leaves or extra travel allowance. You can also give them the option of getting concession on air tickets or hotel bookings, under corporate offers and discounts.

If this doesn’t work for you, then the best way is to take your employees for a vacation on behalf of the company. You can either make it a part of your team building exercise or a corporate vacation, which can be an annual event.

A Learning Experience in the End

Traveling makes for a great hobby and learning experience. Most of the travelers collect experiences, make new friends and are able to apply their traveling lessons to other parts of life which leads to a better overall development of a person. So if you want your employees to do more and better at the workplace, allow employee travel and motivate them to go out of the workplace and experience more.

disclaimer: I was provided compensation for this sponsored post.