Tap into HR’s Expertise to Enhance Your T&E Program: An SAP Concur Conversations podcast with HR Campus

Travel and expense (T&E) management and human resources (HR) typically reside in separate silos on an org chart. But if you think about it, HR is responsible for payroll, benefits, duty of care, employee data, and corporate policies for employees in the office, working remotely, and on the road — all of which closely relate to T&E. Organizations that recognize the upside of this often overlooked intersection are encouraging their HR and T&E management to collaborate. Benefits include happier employees, increased compliance, and improved support of organizational goals, particularly with digital transformation.

In this episode of the SAP Concur Conversations podcast, Philippe Dutkiewicz, co-owner of HR Campus, and Philipp Brunner, an HR consultant at HR Campus, talk with Jeanne Dion, Vice President of the Value Experience team at SAP Concur, about how T&E management and HR can successfully collaborate to create T&E systems that are easier to use, more efficient, and less expensive. Here are some of the highlights from their conversation.

You can listen to this episode on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite place to find podcasts.

Employees are happier when T&E programs offer flexibility, ease, and peace of mind

Employees want several things when it comes to T&E:

• Flexibility when making travel arrangements
• Ease in submitting expense reports
• Peace of mind that they’re correctly following processes

T&E management can tap into HR’s expertise with employee satisfaction and ever-improving technology to meet these needs. “By aligning across organizational goals with those employee needs in mind, a business can really create a workplace culture that fosters not only compliance, but well-being and satisfaction and ultimately success, not just for the employee but for the business as well,” Dion says.

“You can make life easier for your employees, you can show how much trust you give your employees. And obviously, you can also think about how you provide a good user experience,” says Dutkiewicz. How you ask your employees to interact with T&E reflects your corporate culture and branding from an HR perspective, he adds.

T&E, in particular, impacts your culture “because it affects most of your employees,” notes Dion. “Pretty much most of your employees are going to do some sort of travel or submit some sort of expense across the lifetime of their tenure with you.”

Want to be more efficient? Simplify!

One key to giving employees the experience they want and the organization the compliance it needs: simplification. “Simplify the process to make it as efficient as possible,” says Brunner. Employees want “to know what they should do and what they can do. And in order to do that, it should be as easy as possible.”

Ironically, the ever-rising complexity and capability of technology on the back end enables the front-end ease and efficiency for employees. For example, using artificial intelligence (AI), you can create a conversational expense report using chatbots, which can automatically show or hide a T&E policy in real-time based on what the user is doing. “If you digitalize [your policy] in the system, then it’s only then visible to your employees when it should show,” says Dutkiewicz. If an employee is correctly submitting an expense report, they won’t see the policy. “If somebody does something that is not according to policy, the policy basically becomes visible,” he adds.

The travel management team also benefits. “AI-driven solutions really can enhance the employee experience as well as organizational outcomes,” adds Dion. For instance, built-in intelligence can also eliminate manual control processes. “Have these rules in your systems and let the system work for you — and make the process clean and easy for your employees,” Dutkiewicz says. “Keep the hurdles low, put a lot of trust in your employees, but still implement control at the end of the process.”

“Light processes” cost less, increase employee satisfaction, and control spend more effectively

Simplification and decreased complexity for users lead to “light processes,” in contrast to previously cumbersome manual processes. “If you have these light processes, then obviously you spend less money on processes as a [company],” Dutkiewicz explains. “You have happier employees, and you will still be able to basically keep the spend [control] that you need in your company.”

When HR Campus is working with organizations to design a T&E system, one of the biggest challenges comes when “they want to implement the same thing that they had in the past to a digital workplace,” says Dutkiewicz. “If you bring this old mentality into a new set of tools, then you can still frustrate your employees, even if you have excellent tools…in the workplace.”

If your organization is designing or revamping a digital T&E system, “it’s a really good time to start rethinking the current policy that is in place,” Brunner notes.

Dutkiewicz agrees it’s a perfect opportunity to keep employee experience in mind. “If you move into a digital world where you use AI to support the processes to capture your expenses, you can basically design them very light at the beginning and then invest more in reporting and controlling.”

HR specializes in employee satisfaction. Learn how that expertise can enhance your T&E program in this SAP Concur Conversations podcast