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Motivation in Action: Adventure Life’s Outdoor Incentives
May 12, 2009
The travel company encourages its employees to enjoy the experiences that it sells to its clients
By Kassia Shishkoff
If you are going to be enthusiastic about the company you work for, you should be familiar with the products it sells. That is no less true for Adventure Life, a Missoula, Mont.–based travel company that organizes outdoor tours throughout Central and South America. At Adventure Life, employees are allowed—in fact, encouraged—to visit the locations where the company sends its clients. Each year, they are given a $1,200 stipend to go on one of the company’s many South and Central American tours and asked to keep a travel journal, which is put on the Web site for the benefit of potential clients.
“We’re a travel company, so we want people to travel,” says Brian Morgan, president of Adventure Life. “I encourage employees to bring with them a partner or family member because I want this not to be work; I really want this to be fun and an exciting thing for them.”
Each of Morgan’s 16 employees is offered the stipend plus any discounts Adventure Life’s partners and providers can give them once they’re at the destination.
“We extend any discounts we can to the family members as well,” says Morgan. “Our suppliers to a great job of assisting them once they get there. It really extends the benefit to the whole family.”
Adventure Life staff members can select from any of the company’s many destinations, including the Galapagos Islands, Peru, Guatemala, Antarctica and a worldwide expedition cruise.
“We really let them choose where they want to go so they can go to the places that most interest them,” says Morgan. “They can take a trip they might not normally be able to afford, or might not think of.”
The employees aren’t the only ones who see the benefit of taking their family on a yearly vacation while working for Adventure Life. Morgan reaps the benefits too—harder work upon their return, and also credibility with the company’s paying clients. Staff members post an entry to the Web site for each day of their trip, outlining their activities and including photos.
Other programs and benefits that Adventure Life offers its employees include paying half the cost of a health club membership, a small education stipend, and flexible scheduling. New mothers are even allowed to bring their infants in to work until they’re five months old. This allows moms to continue work instead of staying home with their child until the baby is eligible for daycare.
“I’m told this is a huge benefit for female employees,” says Morgan. “And it works great for me because I’ve been able to hold onto their productivity.” It even keeps new moms from feeling like they need to quit their job to be with their baby. And if a growing family or anything else prevents them from using their travel stipend one year, there are no regrets—half of it rolls over to the next year, giving them $1,800.
Adventure Life is not the sort of company that sets up trips for people to rent a condo and relax in it all day. What they do is much more hands-on. One group of doctors and their families went to Costa Rica, where they went river rafting, hiking in the Monteverde Cloud Forest in Costa Rica, and played on a zip line. The company does not consider itself to be a conventional incentive travel group by any means, but it has adapted for these sorts of groups and believes it has an appeal for this market.
“People are so much more active, they want to go out and do active things on their vacation time,” says Morgan. “[Companies] start to see that their groups don’t want to just go on a cruise.”
As for Adventure Life’s employees, the travel stipend allows them a chance to get out of the rut of office life.
“You sit all day long in the office and you talk about all these trips and you fill out the paperwork, and you can lose track [of what you’re doing],” says Morgan. “When they go on these trips it’s kind of like they rediscover, ‘Wow, this is why I work here.’”
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