Travel and TOIL

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How do people do TOIL and travel in a remote organisation? What’s best practice.

i.e if you have to travel to a staff day and it takes 4 hours on the train. Do you count the travel as TOIL, or just the commute, or take part half the travel time as TOIL, or something else?

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In a fully remote organisation I think any travel time required by the post counts as work time - so if the travel makes the day longer than the standard working day, anything additional counts as TOIL. With an understanding that where possible folks will be working while travelling. That’s what we do at the Tax Justice Network which is fully remote.

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Similar at GM Freeze (which I recently left). It’s directed work time and any work done en route us great but absolutely cannot be demanded as a lot of folk can’t read/type on trains, buses etc.

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if it helps to contribute to thinking - I’m fully remote in all my contracts, but where there may be ‘in person’ activities, always include 50% of the travel time as ‘working’ time.

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We have these ‘guidelines’ in our travel policy:

(context: everyone has a fixed number of ‘working days’ per year; most people/teams can decide for themselves when travelling is useful for their work)

Travel time

Before deciding to travel, we ask you to check with your team members (or your 1-1, or someone else from the collective) how many days you should attend an event.

How to count work days when traveling?

  • If you would like to, you can count 1 travel day as 1 working day. It is also possible to count half days.

This also counts if you are not able to work while traveling (e.g. if you are travel sick or do not have internet, etc.).

  • 1 day of work abroad = 1 normal work day. We trust you to count work days in a fair way, if you have questions, share them with the collective.
  • If you decide to extend your trip for your own pleasure, this is not counted as work days.

Suggestions:

  • When you travel with other team members, agree together how many work days a trip/event amounted to.
  • When traveling for work, for instance to camps, ask yourself if it is fair to really count all days as working days.
  • We acknowledge that traveling can be intense and tiring, and that one should have the possibility to recover after travel. Try to do this as soon as you are back from your trip. For example: if you were traveling 5 days and you usually work 3 days a week, you only work 1 day the week after.
  • Remember your traveling impacts the work flow of the collective. Try to find a balance between traveling and working from home.
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Really appreciate the flexibility and trust of this! Do you think it might be something you could upload to the library, @Mari_Gastivists??