Four Steps to Support Your Employees Whilst Achieving Cost Efficiency

In the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, and as inflation rises, businesses will look at the challenges of traditional Travel and Expense management process in order to find ways to be more cost efficient and boost compliance; a topic we covered in the first blog in this series. In this blog, we’re going to look at the importance of supporting employees during the crisis. 

As inflation soars and everything from fuel to food costs more, employees will be experiencing their own challenges, which can impact their job satisfaction, wellbeing and productivity.

Just as employees are suffering the consequences of rising costs in their personal lives, many businesses will be facing stark budget cuts. This means they are unable to give employees what they want or need which can lead to dissatisfaction and even churn which only adds to the financial strain.

What Do Businesses Need to Do Now?

How your business responds to this now will shape how well you emerge from the current crisis. Business expenses is an area often overlooked when creating a positive employee experience, but this is something you should consider during these turbulent times.

Having an employee expense claim process that’s intuitive and makes it easy to file a claim can go a long way in making employees feel appreciated and cared for.

There are a four steps to make the expense process smoother and quicker for employees and approvers alike. Ultimately, you need to:

1. Take control of out-of-policy spending
2. Limit out of pocket expenditure
3. Automate policy adherence to lower the stress of mistaken expense fraud or misspend
4. Ensure expense policies are flexible and can be amended and adjusted according to employee demands and business needs.

 

Expense Management in Times of Inflation: How to Improve Employee Experience

For further guidance on how to support your employees, take a look at our eBook, which explores how automated expense management can help employees through these challenging time.

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What Is the Impact of Inflation and the Cost-of-Living Crisis on Employees?

Your employees are affected by inflation and rising costs in a myriad of ways, particularly now that hybrid working is so prevalent. Forrester’s Workforce Survey 2022, reveals that two-thirds of European online adults expect to be allowed to work from home more often, which means given the choice, many will have to weigh up the energy cost of working from home with the fuel cost of traveling to the office. 

There’s also the issue of reduced personal funds. Many businesses still expect employees to pay upfront for expense items such as hotels or flights and wait weeks for reimbursement. Whilst that’s never fair, or efficient, it’s even less so during an economic crisis when people will be struggling to pay their own bills, let alone yours. 

A corporate card scheme, integrated with your expense management platform such as SAP Concur solutions, can counter a lot of those issues, as can automated expense processes that speed up reimbursement through connected workflows and greater visibility.

Some employees will feel increased anxiety at a time when all eyes are on business finances – 48% of employees worry they might be accidentally committing fraud by making mistakes or expensing unauthorised purchases.

Additionally, they might be seeking wage increases to counteract inflation. In Europe, only 42% of employees say they are living comfortably on their present income. 

Couple these extra strains with frustrations over slow, cumbersome expense processes, and you have a perfect storm for disgruntlement.

How Can SAP Concur Solutions Support Your Employees?

The good news is, by automating your expense management process you can ease the pressure on your employees, keep them in pocket and, crucially, control and flex your T&E and invoice policies based on employee needs and developments in the market. As a result, your employees will benefit from:

• Faster reimbursement

58% of employees worry that delayed reimbursements because of poor expense processes will affect their personal finances further. By automating your business expense approval process and connecting your workflows, employees won’t suffer the stress of being out of pocket. ExpenseIt, for example, turns paper receipts into digital expense entries, making expense reports faster and more accurate.

• Inbuilt policy adherence

Nearly half of employees worry that their managers will think badly of them if their expense claims are high, which suggests some employees may not be expensing all their business costs. With Concur Expense, policies are built into the system so employees don’t have to worry.

• Flexible expense policies

Being able to amend and update policies automatically is a huge bonus for businesses who want to keep their employees happy – particularly when it comes to new hybrid working expense items. 37% of finance and HR decision-makers believe that employees will become increasingly dissatisfied if expense policies aren’t adjusted to account for inflation, and with SAP Concur solutions you can always stay ahead of what employees want and what’s best for your business.

Ease the Stress of Expenses

Employees are the lifeblood of your business and taking care of them during difficult times is essential. By putting the stress of expenses to the back of their mind will help keep morale high, boost loyalty and ultimately help guide you to the other side of the cost-of-living crisis.

In the next blog in this series, we’ll be looking at bigger picture and how IT and finance can work together to build a more holistic spend governance strategy to combat the negative effects of inflation and survive the cost-of-living crisis.