Meeting Your Duty of Care to Business Travelers: Guidelines and Tips

Global business travel is back—but it’s more complex than ever. Today’s traveling employees face a broad spectrum of risks that extend far beyond the disruptions of the pandemic. Political unrest, natural disasters, civil protests, cybercrime, transportation strikes, and localized violence are just a few of the evolving threats organizations must now monitor in real time.

These dynamic and often unpredictable challenges can leave business travelers stranded, cut off from communication, or vulnerable in unfamiliar environments. For employers, that creates both a logistical challenge and a critical legal obligation of your duty of care: protecting your employees’ well-being, ensuring every employee can travel safely and return home without incident.

To meet the legal requirements and moral obligations, organizations must adopt a more proactive, flexible approach to travel safety. That means creating a safety-focused corporate travel policy, anticipating risks, leveraging real-time risk intelligence, and maintaining continuous communication with employees on the move. As the risk landscape grows more complex, effective planning and rapid response are essential to keeping your people safe—and your business moving forward.

Why Are Business Travel Care Measures Critical?

What Is Your Duty of Care in Travel Management?

You can satisfy your business travel duty of care by fulfilling a few primary responsibilities and preparing for certain eventualities. All of these tips can be integrated into your existing risk management strategy and duty of care program to seamlessly improve the safety and security of your overall business travel program.

Conduct a risk assessment

Before you can do anything to keep your distributed employees safe, you need to perform a threat assessment that narrows in on employee travel. This process will help you identify potential threats, both likely and unlikely, and predict their effects on your travelers. As part of your business threat assessment, quantify every threat in terms of its impact and likelihood. This analysis will inform your travel risk management plan.

Because each business trip is unique, risk assessments need to be unique as well. Performing an individual risk assessment for each traveler might not be necessary. If one or more of your employees frequently make the same trip, like a foreign office in a safe, stable locale, you might need only one assessment to determine the necessary business travel care measures. In this case, employees might all take the same flight, stay at the same hotel, and follow the same schedule, making potential risks predictable. You will need to revise and update the assessment, but it might not need much personalization for each traveler.

However, if you plan on sending employees to places your organization does not go to often or places recognized as high-risk, you’ll need to draft a new risk assessment. In any case, you’ll complete this careful assessment before making a trip. Once you’ve pinpointed all potential dangers, you can plan to prevent or react to each of them.

Make a plan

What Are Common Travel Risks and Safety Strategies?

The specific risks your traveling employees may face will vary widely depending on the kind of business you do, where you travel, and other factors. An energy company that sends employees on international travel trips to oil fields in remote parts of Saudi Arabia has to prepare for mitigating risks far different from those a software company must prepare for with sales reps traveling domestically. It will also be important to consider employee health issues or personal risks when planning travel security measures.

Needless to say, you must create your own business travel plans and tailor them for your travel process, your travelers, their tasks, and their destinations. We’ve gathered some examples to give you an idea of what these measures might look like.

Natural disasters

Disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, wildfires, and landslides are incredibly powerful, destructive forces that wreak havoc around the world every year. However, they tend to occur semi-predictably. That’s not to say that, for example, earthquakes in California can be predicted down to the minute, but they are expected to happen with some regularity, so residents and buildings there are more likely to be prepared for such an event. The same should be true for travel.

Strategy: Your plans should anticipate likely natural disasters in the area your employees will visit and follow best practices to avoid their impacts or to minimize harm to your people.

Targeted violence

While it might sound far-fetched, murder is the second most common cause of injury death to American travelers behind road accidents. Targeted violence involving travelers is often random and unpredictable, but much like natural disasters, these incidents tend to happen more frequently in some places.

Strategy: When a traveling employee is potentially at risk of targeted violence, your threat assessment and other preparatory research must be thorough. By identifying high-risk areas, you can alter your travel plans to avoid them. If that is not possible, and traveling is necessary, consider private close protection (AKA bodyguards) to guard your people.

Cyberattack

If you’ve ever tried to stream a movie while traveling, you know the headache of finding a speedy, open, secure internet connection in an unfamiliar place. Nobody is more aware of this vulnerable connectivity than cyber criminals.

The security of public wifi access points in airports, hotels, and restaurants can be a guessing game. However, guidelines exist to help your people maintain a safe connection to their vital internet-based resources.

Strategy: First of all, loop in your IT department when making your travel plans. Since they’re familiar with the configuration of your company’s internal network and devices, they’ll be able to offer tailored advice. These tips can guide your efforts:

• Access sensitive information only on secured networks. WPA-2 is a popular and usually sufficient encryption protocol, whereas WEP should be avoided. But again, your IT team would know best in this case.
• Use a virtual private network (VPN) to secure traffic from interception.
• Keep everything, especially operating systems and antivirus software, up to date.
• Diligently practice cybersecurity recommendations: keep passwords distinct and hard to guess, be wary of phishing scams, and turn off unnecessary services like location data and Bluetooth.

Complete Care

When employees travel, your business extends to where they go. If you’re fulfilling your duty of care for the day-to-day workers in static locations, you’re already familiar with the considerations you need to make to keep them safe and healthy. Apply similar thinking to the challenges and needs of your employees on the go.

If you’re looking for ways to make the threat identification and communication side easier so you can focus on your people, let us know and we’ll show you how AlertMedia can help.