conferences after leaving a company

Some companies have conference budgets. As an employee, you get a certain maontyof maey a year- 1,000 or 1,5000 are popular in SF right now-to spend on conferenes. This budget usually doesn’t include travel, in my experience. for this price, you can go to 75% of Velocity, or strangeloop and railsconf, or three or four or five cheaper conferences- although at that point you will have t start figuring out who to pay for travel, and if you’re not

It gets weird when the travel is in the system of the company that one has left. Will it stil be honored? One could argue that it should be- it was a benefit, and it was used during the term of employement, and the fulfillment is stil pending

Ont he other hand, companie might not be obligated to give employyee benefirts to people that are not currently employed by that company And

What if the employyee knows that they plan to quit and uses all their benefits up at once? Is this meaningfully different from using your health benefits before year end? i would say yes, because health benefits are for human wellbeing rather than about 0professional development. Avoiding (or ameliorating) harm rather than accruing benefit

Can you still get travel assistance

Frequently the company has already reimbursed you for the ticket, and the travel was booked through their system and so not charged to the employee

It could be argued that the company should not reimburse until after the conference, in order to prevent this situation- but in that case, then maybe the thing to do is to never If the company is still working at the company on the dates aof the conference- as indeed you of course hope that they are- then you want them to not have had to bear the cost of a few hudred dollars of tickeet that could have been reimbursed already- keep the duration between payment and reimbursing as short as possible for the best rate of reimbursements made- al lt can halpppen in a few months, recipts lost, caring lost, the money no longer feels “spent” and therefroe the motivation to do the effort (frequently considerable if there are crappy internal systems) for reimbursement is considerable, and then there are amployees that know that the company has not paid them back, that the company will never pay them back- and what if the conference is not as good as it should be? What if the employyee gets very sick on teh first day of the conferece? Should they still expense it?

In general in the current climate fo tech hiring, do your best to give the employees the perks with the benefit of the doubt. Assume that they will still ork for the company when the conference is going on. Assume that the are not trying to cheat the company

What if- for example- a particular division of the company has had their prpduct cancelled, and no specific 3guidelines have been profived, and the internal right hand and the ntrnal left hand do not communiate, and the tier of managers closest to the developers are on the developers side so to speak, and they developers all spend all of their “personal growth budget” all at once in expectation of being laid off (or ignored until they eventually get bored and find new jobs)

Possibilities:

  • Don’t let employees expense conferences (ticket and travel) until after the conference). Probable consequences: lower conference attendance rate, employee annoyance, lower reimbursement rate for attended conferences (receipts get lots, employees have too many other things to do, motivation lapses since the money has already been “spent” for several months). Positives: no pre-paying for conferences and travel that could end up being used by the employee after they have left teh company

  • Let employees expense conference tickets and travel expenses immediately (or book them through the company’s travel website) and allow the employee to use the ticket even after leaving the company. This can have positive reputational effects- for exaple, an employee who has left comapny X but is attending a conference that company X reimbursed them for might feel feeling of goodwill towards company and/or tell others that company X was nice enough to not revoke their sponsorhip tot eh conference. the main benefit of employyee conference attendance however is removed, which is to say that the employyee usually no longer brings their new knowledge from the conference to apply to their workday and to discuss among their team and via other inernal channels, thus enriching the

In some ways, it comes down to- why give a conference benefit? For the purposes of this discussion, a conference

  • If your comany is going a conference benefit in teh hopes that most people will not use it, but that the existance of it will encourage good developers int he market to consider the offer to have parity with other offers that also odffer thisbenefit, then
  • Getting a company name out to potential employees and customers via word of mouth from current employees

reputational damage from asking an employee to pay back a benefit could be significant. What kind of penny-pinching developer not-valuding tech company woudl ask you to repay your conference benefit when leaving the company? What if you leave the company the week after the conference? Where does the line end? Also legality could be an issue if

https://www.icims.com/hire-expectations-institute/for-employers/article-why-you-should-let-your-employees-attend

http://www.askamanager.org/2016/04/we-need-to-make-up-any-time-we-spend-at-conferences-grieving-employee-wont-come-back-full-time-and-more.html https://www.shrm.org/templatestools/hrqa/pages/californiaarereimbursementsforbusiness-relatedexpensesdueimmediatelyatthetimeofterminatio.aspx http://www.askamanager.org/2014/06/my-employer-wants-me-to-repay-business-expenses-because-im-resigning.html http://www.askamanager.org/2014/03/should-a-resigning-employee-have-to-reimburse-us-for-costs-of-a-future-conference-he-signed-up-for.html

“Point out to your boss that what he’s proposing would discourage people from ever signing up for anything more than a month or so out, because they won’t want to be on the hook for the cost in case their circumstances change. Also point out that this is a normal cost of doing business that he’s attempting to shift to employees, and that doing that will be really bad for employee relations and people’s morale.”