Asking HR about incentives/ stipends [closed]

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I had gone to other country on business visa for client meeting. All my expenses ( staying ,food and traveling) was being taken care by my client. I had gone for 1 month. I got the usual salary which I get. Now can I ask my HR that I should receive at least some incentives or bonus or something like that other than my salary. Can I ask about this? If yes then how to put it properly in a convincing way.

manpreet 2 years ago

You can always ask - but I'm not sure what you can expect here.

Typically, at least in the businesses I've worked in, HR is not in charge of handing out extra money randomly to employees just because they traveled. Finance handles reimbursements for expenses - but what you are saying is you have virtually no expenses, as your client covered them all already.

You could attempt to ask for extra money on the basis of the hardship of travel (being away from family) - this would be more applicable as a conversation with your manager, who will know the scope of your job responsibilities. Beware - if travel is part of the job functions that were originally explained to you as part of your responsibilities, then your manager is likely to assume that it's covered already by your salary. If this was surprise/emergency travel, then a bonus might be more reasonable, as you have gone above and beyond.

About your only other vector for extra funds would be the case (to your manager, or to finance) that there were costs that were not covered by the client. For example, they may have paid for food, travel, and hotel... but did they cover wireless? Or checked luggage? Or long distance charges to call home? Or for extra clothes or other things you ended up purchasing if the stay was longer than originally expected. Expect to be asked for receipts for this stuff. And the weirder your cost, the more likely you'll need a receipt. Most likely, if you are in a big company, there's a reimbursement policy that is worth reading first.

Update from @HLGEM inspired me...

The time to know whether or not you can request or get extra money is generally BEFORE you travel. A travel budget for a company is planned anywhere from monthly to yearly. Often customer-paid trips are planned in an entirely separate place than the company paid trips, and often the company doesn't expect a cross-over between the costs. In other words, if they had known they had to pay money for the trip, they may never have approved it at all. You can always ask about policy for the future, but you can't reasonably expect money to happen AFTER the travel if you didn't negotiate it in the first place.

The big exception I could think of was cases where the travel was unexpectedly difficult and therefore imposed a hardship you couldn't see coming. Example - you were asked to do customer travel for a week, but it extended into 3 weeks, causing you to be away much longer than expected and it incurred both cost and inconvenience. Cases that no one could see coming are fair game for a check-in after the fact.