Business travel transformed after the 2020 pandemic. Fulfilling your duty of care and ensuring corporate travel safety is still intended to support employee health, wellness and safety while traveling, but there is an added complexity which nowadays comes in the form of the war in the Middle East, extreme weather conditions, political instability, cyber threats and health emergencies.
Duty of care is no longer about having one overarching solution to make for seamless business trips. It’s about protecting and preparing your employees so they can carry out their jobs outside of the office as well and as safely as possible. It’s about lending a helping hand to make a series of choices that puts your travelers at the least risk possible, ensuring successful and productive business trips.
Keep reading to find out how you can keep your travelers safe.
Travel risk management
Travel risk management is about ensuring that you have steps in place in order to protect your travelers, by anticipating, preventing, and reacting to dangers that business travelers may face on their journeys. The idea is to compensate for these risks through effective planning, reliable support and regularly reviewing your travel program.
A great way to measure how well you are performing with travel risk management is to look at traveler wellbeing KPIs.
Some of the potential travel risks are:
- Economic health
The economy has a direct impact on business travel, influencing the products and services that are consumed, and the budget that companies have at disposal to travel, plus the economic situation also affects companies’ necessity to control costs. Tariffs, a changing geopolitical situation and rising costs directly affect how much companies have at their disposal for travel costs.
- Climate change and extreme weather
Extreme weather is more and more becoming a regular occurrence. Floods, turbulent winds, hurricanes, extreme snow and earthquakes are real obstacles that business travelers will face. Travel teams must be ready to adapt policies in order to support travelers delayed by extreme weather.
- World politics
World politics can affect business travel when there is civil unrest, war, protests and elections. If you have the responsibility of protecting your travelers, it’s important to be aware of these potential risks and be able to assess whether there is a likelihood of this impacting your traveler’s trips. This is exactly what happened with the Israel-US war on Iran. Earlier this year many business travelers were stranded in APAC, not able to pass through the Middle East. In cases like these it’s important to help travelers feel safe, know their options and know who to call.
pro tip
If you’re working with a corporate travel and expense solution like GetGoing, you can get 24 hour, round the clock support anywhere in the world.
- Personal risks
Traveling can put you more at risk for theft, robbery and other unpredictable threats, especially when traveling to underdeveloped countries. As the person in charge of travel for your company, or if you’re booking your own trip, ensure that you sign up for embassy alerts and study the possible threats when traveling to potentially risky destinations.
- Cyber threats
Cyber threats can come in the form of hackers trying to access private information for personal gain. When traveling you must provide a lot of sensitive personal data, which should it be compromised can be potentially harmful. As a company to protect your employees, it’s important to provide proper training about how to recognize cyber threats and keep employees digitally aware to minimize the impact, especially as AI-powered threats become more commonplace.
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- Health risks
While the Covid-19 scare is no longer a threat, we are faced again with the possibility of contracting other viruses, parasites and diseases while traveling. Make sure to keep your travelers safe by educating them on the potential health risks.
To be sure, the business trip is worth it and cannot be replaced with a zoom meeting, check out our post:
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Steps to ensure corporate travel safety
TRAVELER SAFETY BEFORE THE TRIP
1. Effective planning and information
To plan effectively you need to be sure to be able to provide up-to-date information about the destination and the associated travel risks. You may also want to inform travelers about potential risks such as:
- Social, political, economic or cultural conditions that are worth keeping in mind
- Safety and reliability of transportation (i.e. Is it safe to take the local bus or is it better to take a taxi?)
- Levels and severity of crime
- Possibility of natural disasters such as hurricanes, storms, earthquakes, tsunami, etc.
Encourage your travelers to update their travel profiles and emergency contacts. Your employees must help you help them so that if worst comes to worst you know who to contact and how to contact them.
2. Booking
By using a Travel and Expense Management platform like GetGoing, companies can make business travel bookings, living up to your duty of care, automatically approving trips and setting up certain parameters in your travel policy that not only support your budget but also your traveler safety. This ensures that travel requirements are met and are within policy before tickets are issued. Find out how to automate your travel policy.
When you use a Business Travel & Expense Management Platform like GetGoing, you have access to a traveler tracking system, so at any given time you can see where your travelers are, helping you even more to fulfill your duty of care. Learn more about traveler safety.
3. Support
Make sure your company is ready to support your travelers in case of need. This means helping them with making bookings and better understanding your company’s travel and expense policy, as well as providing assistance once they are on the road. Normally it is more about supporting travelers who need emergency medical assistance, get in a car accident or experience trip interruption and travel delays.
Discover the importance of a corporate wellbeing program in supporting your employees.
TRAVELER SAFETY DURING THE TRIP
4. Traveling to the destination
Once travelers are on the road, make sure they keep you posted that they made it safely to their destination and if there were any itinerary changes. Ensure that before travelers depart, they know how much they will get reimbursed for meals and travel expenses, and that they have an emergency contact number should they need it. A smoothly running trip means that travelers keep in touch with the people who are responsible in the company for travel whether that be HR or the Office Manager.
TRAVELER SAFETY AFTER THE TRIP
5. Traveling home
Learn from each other’s travel experiences. Were there long waits at airports? Asking the right questions allows everyone in your office to better prepare for their business trips.
6. Feedback and review
IIn an ever-changing travel environment, it’s important to constantly review and update your travel policies. A big part of fulfilling your duty of care is keeping up-to-date with the latest information so that you can protect your employees and make sure they’re safe.
This is why we recommend reviewing your travel risk management program. Check in with travelers, especially those who travel often for suggestions and feedback and see how you are doing and where there is room for improvement. The better they feel about traveling and the safer they feel, the more productive they will be on the road.
Fulfilling your duty of care and ensuring corporate travel safety
Of course by following these steps, there are no guarantees that you won’t run into some glitches along the way as business travel slowly picks up, but by following these tips, you can do your best to keep your travelers safe, fulfill your duty of care and make getting back to travel all the easier.