Originally Posted by
WilcoRoger
nacho you libertarians in Denmark, giving the traveling folks extra perks!
Still I am very surprised that this is in Denmark. Over here in Finland, none of my employers ever had mention of spouses in their travel policies. My wife traveled with me quite a few times. Emancipated Finnish women need no permission to travel
The stay-over-for-the-weekend policy is just the opposite here - government employees have a strict no-no (obviously to avoid the impression that folks are holidaying on taxpayer money) while private employers have usually “if it ain’t cost us, we don’t mind” - ie no hotel costs are reimbursed and no per diem paid for those days. Usually it saves them some money if the return flight is cheaper on Sun than on Fri.
Maybe the CEOs are enjoying it and wanting to spread the joy to others instead of spending time with their boring spouses
Mr. can easily have an extra wife and a few kids where he travels to regularly. Or if he prefers excitement he can pick a different one each time he goes
I found this odd too, but somehow some Danish companies think that spouses are distracting their partners when they are on business... The Danish government has cut down A LOT since Mr. left, now the salary in the public sector is about 2/3 of what you get in private sector! Right after he left his colleagues told him that business travel is strictly in discounted Y. Back in the 60s I was told that there were free cigarettes in every meeting (I'm sure this has encouraged a lot of people to participate in the meetings and they might last as long as the cigarettes). Now if you are lucky you see sandwiches apart from the coffee during meetings.
Let's say if Mr. got an approval that I fly to meet him up on a Friday and we pay the hotel bills ourselves - his travel itinerary would look like there is a gap which is going to be flagged.
I heard something even more scary from his former employer today: Mr said that there was a course for managers of that company to take to know what kind of behaviour is expected. The CEO said even if you are not working you need to behave in a certain ways. He made an example that one of the managers was overtaking from the right while driving and overtook him. He actually went to that manager and gave him a speech. Mr commented to him that it is a bit too much, and he said, "if you think this is too much maybe you should not work here".
The person was driving in his own car, no company logo. This company is pretty mediocore - Mr. can really take it easy and work until he retires. There is not much happening so there are very few organizational changes which lead to layoff.
The last time I heard about this was when I was a secondary school student in Hong Kong - my school has a rule that if you are wearing the school uniform you represent the school, and therefore you need to behave nicely to others. That was 35 years ago.