COMMENT: Duty of Care for Travel Risk Management
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Duty of Care (DoC) in relation to Travel Risk Management (TRM) is now a well-known business concept however it is surprising to discover the different levels of adoption across organisations.
When International SOS Foundation published its “Duty of Care and Travel Risk Management Global Benchmarking Study in 2011, it was a relatively new business concept even though, in the UK at least, its legal framework had existed since 1974.
DoC introduced a moral component to the way organisations viewed their health and safety responsibilities and its definition in this study makes no mention to a legal requirement: A requirement that a person/organisation acts toward others and the public with watchfulness, attention, caution and prudence in a matter that a reasonable person in the same or similar circumstances would.
What does this mean in practice? There is a legal requirement to have an acknowledged policy document, to conduct a risk assessment and to provide employees with appropriate knowledge and training. We have all seen policies that focus solely on finance, lip service to risk assessments and leaflets handed out instead of recorded training which might just cover the legal aspects, but fall short of a DoC. The moral component gives a TRM programme a much needed human element to fulfil that DoC.
International travel is proven to be stressful and it is only right that an employee should be given the correct support at each stage of their journey, before, during and after travel. Nearly all organisations provide business travel insurance even though this is not a legal requirement, implying that they all know that something serious and/or expensive could happen to their travellers!
It is well known that an organisation can’t outsource its DoC responsibilities and yet there are many companies who, in addition to insurance, add tracking, occupational health and emergency assistance over completing risk assessments and providing training.
DoC has evolved and become even more mainstream since 2011 and a number of surveys have been conducted globally. A common finding in surveys about corporate travel risk is the paucity of organisations who confidently state they have a robust process for looking after their travellers. Most aspire to have an excellent system in place, however they are often hampered by their understanding of what is required, the resources they are given, the support of the organisation and institutional knowledge.
According to the 2015 Federation for Expatriate Management 2015 study which polled 204 organisations globally, 8% said that DoC to their business travellers was not on the agenda – only 57% of the organisations rated DoC a medium or high priority. Whilst 14% of respondents admitted they had been subject to a safety incident in the previous 12 months an alarming 38% said they didn’t know.
This could perhaps be due to the role of the respondents within the company, which leads to a much greater worry for the traveller – the disjointedness of the business units which have responsibility for, ownership of and make decisions about DoC. In the 2011 study it was seen that HR had a dominant stake in DoC a surprising finding given “results previously indicated that HR has a low risk perception of threats and low ratings on industry, company and specific areas of DoC awareness”.
ACTE recently published a report stating that 51% of corporate travel executives have said recent events (in Europe predominantly) have led them to change their duty of care procedures, which indicates that the systems in place were not fit for purpose beforehand, or perhaps the risk assessments were wrong. Interestingly this study found that 10% of business travellers don’t think their employer cares about them; this equates to millions of individual travellers. This might be due to many organisations benchmarking DoC against their most seasoned travellers.
This month a further study was published by Collinson Group in which large and SME organisations were polled found “that more than double the number of larger corporates vs. SMEs (53% compared to 25%) said they conduct risk assessments if the employee is going to an area deemed “high risk”.” Flip these figures to see how many organisations are not only failing in their duty of care obligations but also their legal requirements.
What next for DoC? In the first instance organisations should revisit their minimum legal responsibilities and when building their TRM framework to support these, add a human touch so that DoC happens naturally.
*Saul Shanagher is the co-founder and director of beTravelwise, a travel safety training specialist catering to corporate clients. For more information, visit www.betravelwise.com
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