Peter Steinfeld: I’m here today with James Henderson, CEO of Healix International, the global risk management and healthcare services provider.

Healix combines medical expertise, travel risk management, and security assistance to help organizations keep their employees safe, healthy, and supported.

Their teams assist with everything from travel disruptions and medical issues to major crises overseas.

Hello, James.

I’m a huge fan of your company and what you guys do.

Thanks so much for being here.

James Henderson: Hi, Peter.

Nice to meet you.

Peter Steinfeld: I follow the work that your company does pretty closely, and the range of situations that your team handles is very remarkable.

You could be helping someone who lost a travel document one day and then coordinating an evacuation from a conflict zone the next.

I imagine there aren’t many typical days in your world.

So when someone does raise their hand and they need help, what does that support look like in practice?

James Henderson: Yeah, you’re right.

It’s no two days of the same.

And just when you think you’ve seen everything, then something will happen that you haven’t seen before.

The support in practice really depends on the situation.

Actually, a lot of what we do is quite unglamorous.

So we are helping people who have just got themselves into a difficult situation.

Maybe their flight’s canceled, they lost the documents.

Maybe they’re on a business trip to Paris and they forgot the medication that they’re on and they don’t know what that medication is in French, and they just need something, somebody to guide them.

Yes, we undertake very intense medical or security evacuations when a situation is really deteriorated.

So it can be very complex, multidisciplinary teams involved, or it can just be a friendly voice at the end of the phone that says, the medication you need in Paris is this and everything in between.

Peter Steinfeld: I imagine a great deal of the interaction is psychology related, just getting people to calm down a bit.

James Henderson: Yeah, I mean, we obviously deal with people who are under duress, they’re under stress.

They don’t call us for a friendly chat.

They call us because they need help.

And depending on when they call us in that cycle will depend on a little bit about the version of them that we might get.

And so our coordinators and all of our people are trained to really de escalate, reassure, and also be prepared to take a little bit of that emotional reaction and help people to work through that and be sympathetic to that, which might also include the family as well.

So a lot of the time, the person that we’re actually helping may well be quite sick or incapacitated.

And it’s the family member, the son, the daughter, the partner, the husband, the Wife we’re actually dealing with and they’re very distressed because their loved one is understandably a concern for them.

Peter Steinfeld: Well, I always love to hear great stories.

Can you take us through one of the more challenging situations your team has navigated?

James Henderson: Probably one of the most complex, challenging scenarios we had originated out of the Middle east conflict.

Earlier in the year, as the situation deteriorated, we identified that one of our clients actually had a family of academics that were in Tehran at the time.

As the airspace closed, the conflict zone increased.

Getting people out of Iran proved to be extremely difficult because of their nationality.

They were extremely vulnerable from their own personal security perspective.

So we had a very complex situation that unravelled quite quickly.

Operating in countries that are subject to sanctions is extremely difficult because a lot of the things that we would take for granted if we were organizing an evacuation in the UK or in Europe, you can’t take for granted.

So we ended up having to evacuate them out from a neighbouring country and in fact had to send a team in from a neighboring country into Iran during the height of the conflict to actually go and get them out in a safe way.

So that was a very complex operation, involved many teams over several days.

It’s a good example of the unexpected nature of these pieces and it’s interesting.

Of course, every crisis that we see has a sort of a heavy dose of surprise that often comes with it.

Peter Steinfeld: Yeah, that’s a really good point.

When a call comes in, how much of the response can you plan for ahead of time and what needs to be solutioned in real time?

It seems like there’s a real interesting balance that goes on there.

James Henderson: Yeah, I mean what we say to people is the more you can pre solutionized clearly the better.

And obviously when we deal with clients that we send into very high risk locations, we support a number of media organizations who send film crews, reporters into extremely high risk locations.

Now in those scenarios, we will work with them to completely pre assess almost every scenario that you could imagine and some you can’t imagine in into a plan of action that is ready to go should any one of those scenarios play out while they’re on the ground.

So for example, in the event of a medical emergency, where will they go?

What is the local facilities like?

What can you safely treat in country?

What is an automatic evacuation trigger?

So in extremis we will do these very detailed medical emergency response plans with the client.

So, so that every eventuality is planned for and then when something happens, we know and they know exactly what to do.

However, no plan survives contact with the enemy.

So there’s always that variable factor that happens.

But you know, in most traveling scenarios, people aren’t preparing for the worst.

We’re all naturally optimistic people, as we should be.

So in most of what we do, we are responding live in the moment to what we’re being told and having to solutionize pretty much on the spot.

So it sort of varies depending on what type of case we’re dealing with.

Peter Steinfeld: Yeah.

So you guys have to be really quick on your feet then.

James Henderson: Yes.

And that triage.

So we have a very experienced triage team.

So every call that comes in to us goes into a triage team.

And their job is to really make an assessment very quickly on is this a scenario that needs to be escalated.

And escalated means we need to bring in more senior medics, more doctors, more security specialists, or someone’s life is at risk, or they’re trapped or they’ve been abducted.

So we have a variety of specialists that are waiting to be engaged in a case.

So the triage team are working out who do they need in the case asap, but also they’re there to de escalate.

So if you call and you’re a lost luggage case, they will help you to get to the right person to help you.

But you know, you’re not going to be talking to our chief medical officer if you’ve lost your bag, as you would expect.

Peter Steinfeld: And you mentioned earlier that there are certain organizations that are intentionally going into dangerous places around the world.

So they know this is important, they plan for it.

But generally speaking, are organizations getting better at preparing for situations like medical emergencies, evacuations, and major overseas disruptions?

Are you still seeing the same challenges?

James Henderson: I think to a degree.

The big events that we’ve all experienced, so coronavirus, the COVID crisis, or even the Middle east example earlier this year, I think we’ve all seen the disruptive nature of some of those events.

So at one level, I would say organizational awareness is higher overall than it would have been, say five years ago, six years ago, if we were talking 10 years ago.

However, I think that’s a general point.

It’s still very reactive in nature.

So what we’re trying to get people to do is to think much more careful about what their relative exposure is.

And the world is undoubtedly a more complex and more volatile place today than it has been for a very long time and shows no sign of changing.

So a lot of our job now is spent in that risk prevention scenario where we’re encouraging organizations to think about what their exposure to particular event is or particular choke points of travel or disruption and try to get people to do a personalised risk assessment.

There’s not enough personalised risk assessment that is going on.

We all understand what happens if you can’t fly, if we get a pandemic.

Understood.

But actually, how does that relate to the organisational risk profile and the preparation an organization should be doing?

In my humble opinion, not enough organisations are doing that very personalized risk assessment.

Some are, more are than ever before.

But the vast majority of organizations are not doing that.

And that’s something that we would advise people to think carefully about.

Peter Steinfeld: Yeah, and I think you’re right that what do you call it, maybe a disaster memory that we have collectively as a society has really built up over the years.

I noticed a real sea change after 911 happened and then Katrina was a follow on to that and these big disasters started occurring and it just changed how people look at things like duty of care.

You mentioned it before, but businesses do have a duty of care to protect their employees.

But it seems to me that that concept of duty of care has really shifted over the years with all the changing threat landscape.

So what are your thoughts on that?

James Henderson: Let me be clear.

Duty of care is fundamentally important and it goes to the heart of the moral contract that as an employer you have with your employees, that you have a very important responsibility to care for them and to make sure that you do not put them into danger unknowingly.

So it’s a very important piece.

I think there is a bit of duty of care fatigue.

Duty of care has been used extensively, particularly in the market that we work in, to market products and services against duty of care.

And I think if you talk to a lot of risk managers, security managers, honestly, I think they would acknowledge there’s a bit of duty of care fatigue.

And actually someone mentions duty of care, oh, here we go, they’re going to try and sell me something.

So it has been a little bit over associated with the marketing of the solutions, if that makes sense.

And I think that has had a negative impact on the very serious and very important content that sits underneath that.

So, I mean, in summary, yeah, hugely important, something that more organizations need to do.

And again, it’s the key for me with duty of care is this personalized nature of it that my duty of care as the CEO of Helix to my employees and yours as a leader to people that might work for you, they can be very different, they’ll have similar principles.

But actually what works for me and my organization may not work for you and your organization, it has to be personalized.

And that again comes back to that personalized risk assessment.

That’s very important.

Peter Steinfeld: It is.

There’s no one size fits all.

And I’m actually kind of curious, how much personal responsibility do you think falls into duty of care?

I remember when I first started in my career, many, many years ago, if I were going to go on a business trip, it’s like, hey, good luck, we’ll see you when you get back.

And that was about it.

But today that’s the pendulum is really swung the other way.

Is there a nice balance where you can look an employee in the eye and say, look, there’s certain things that you just have to do and take care of, but know that we have your back if the line gets crossed here.

James Henderson: I think that’s a fundamental principle we can provide frameworks, policies, training, guidance.

The employer has a significant obligation to provide the framework and the foundation of the duty of care for that organization.

But at the end of the day, if you decide to leave your hotel at one in the morning and go for a walk in the dark alley round the back, I can’t control that.

And I can respond if something goes wrong, but I can’t control it.

So of course there’s a very important personal accountability in terms of somebody engaging in an open and constructive way with the material.

So, but also, you know, policies and controls that are there, adhering to those and not going around the edges.

And so I think that the employer has this very important responsibility around the delivery of the framework, which includes the quality of the framework.

So let me give you a great example of this.

If you look at elearning, there’s been a tremendous development in E learning technology in the last, say five years.

So five years ago we might be sitting there together doing a horrific tick box elearning module where we’re, you know, two dimensional screens.

Now the best elearning that we’ve got there now is like a first person interactive computer game.

I mean like we’ve decided to do elearning with you and I for the streets of Cairo.

Okay?

And so guess what?

You and I will walk down the street of Cairo together in a first person interactive virtual reality way.

And the risks that are coming towards us, the video will pause, we’ll be asked to identify it.

It’s actually quite enjoyable.

It’s almost video game esque.

So the quality of the framework and some of the delivery has really got a lot better.

But I still need you to come and participate with me and do that and when we actually get to Cairo, I still need you to make sure you don’t go down that alley down the side of the hotel.

So there is this balance to be struck is what I’m trying to say.

Peter Steinfeld: Yeah.

So the most important thing an organization can do around duty of care is setting the framework and expectations on each side.

If you clearly define that, then there should be no confusion when someone’s out and about doing their job.

James Henderson: Yeah.

And again, I think the other bit, the employer’s also got an obligation around the quality of the framework.

Okay.

So whether it’s the quality of the technology that you’re buying, the quality of the app solution that you’re providing your employees with, the quality of the e learning, the quality of the assistance provision, you’ve got some really important due diligence requirements to make sure that everything is a sufficient quality and it works.

And when you know, when there’s a problem, whether it’s the missing medication or the bag or heaven forbid, a medical emergency, the quality of the delivery.

So you’ve got all of that responsibility as the employer, but actually you still need me as the employee to engage constructively and openly in that process with you.

Peter Steinfeld: Well, as you insinuated before, duty of care has a cost associated with it.

So what helps leaders understand the value of investing in preparedness and response measures?

Because they’re usually framed as cost centers instead of investments.

So how do you change that perspective?

James Henderson: That’s a really, really hard thing to do.

And I think that if we had some senior risk professionals or security professionals on this call, I think what they would tell you is that it tends to follow a cycle.

So what happens is there’s either a world crisis or something really bad has happened to the organization.

And guess what, they don’t have a budget problem for the next two or three years.

But after a while you everything’s calmed down, people move on, the new CFO arrives, he or she goes through the cost line and then there’s this big duty of care bill.

And yeah, and then they come under pressure.

And sadly, it does often take something to go wrong or more optimistically, for there to be a near miss before an organization will then re engage with that.

So that is a really challenging cycle for an organization to be in.

And if you’re the person responsible for that budget and be sort of asking for that budget, that’s a really hard gift big to have because actually the better you are at your job and the more you’ve de risked the situation, the less ammunition you have to make the case for more spend.

Does that make sense?

So it is a hard one.

I don’t envy people in that situation.

Peter Steinfeld: Yeah, oftentimes it’s really helpful to point to near misses like you said, or something that affected someone else or another organization in your industry or somewhere in your state or your city and say, look there but for the grace of God go us.

That literally could have happened here.

And if it did, guess what?

Here’s how it would have impacted us.

So, you know, the saying I always use is you can tug at the heartstrings with anecdotes and those could be things that happen to you or to someone in your industry or nearby, but you really tug at the purse strings by then backing it up with the statistics of how this would have impacted the organization very specifically and just kind of keep going through that cycle over and over.

It doesn’t happen to happen to you to make it effective to convince your executive this is worth the continued investment.

James Henderson: I completely agree with that, Peter.

And actually going back to one of the things we said at the beginning was the world is an increasingly uncertain place.

And actually in that context, you’ve got to be a negative person to not be able to see that.

Actually the frequency of conflict, the geopolitical situation that we’re working in, the actual conflicts that still exist, the likely conflicts that might be next, all of these situations are not difficult to imagine impacts in.

And so if you are a company that has some kind of global footprint or some kind of traveling population, a little bit of uncertainty is quite helpful to at least make the point that this might be something that you should be thinking about.

Peter Steinfeld: Yeah, it’s not if, but when.

James Henderson: 100%.

Peter Steinfeld: Well, with that in mind, how is the way that you plan for global risk changed as threats become just harder to predict?

James Henderson: I think there’s two things that we think about.

One of them is that very personalized risk assessment that we talked about earlier, which is actually making sure that we’re spending time with our clients to really anticipate what that world landscape means for them and very specifically them, their operation, their people, their locations.

So that might be looking at just a small part of their operation in a particular part of the world and really deep diving that with them.

It might be a more general assessment around travel.

It might be looking at where they’re planning to deploy people.

And we work with a number of people who run, for example, project based work.

And so they know a year ahead, where are they tendering for significant projects in interesting places.

And actually how would they begin to prepare for that ahead of time?

So this first bucket is very much around that personalized, but the second one is more subtle and it’s something which we’re seeing which is the common, what we call second or third order impacts of peace.

So what I mean by that is you and I think about the Middle east crisis that we’ve seen this year.

And what do we think about?

Well, we think about immediately the risk of being in that region when they were firing missiles at each other.

And we might then think about the travel disruption and we might think about people who are stranded and need to be evacuated or in my Iran example, people who maybe were in the region and no one knew they were there, that type of thing.

So we think about very much the first order impacts of the crisis.

What we’re encouraging organizations to think about now is what we call second and third order.

So you can see again, I’ll use the Middle east as an example that we’ve now seen a prolonged impact on fuel security.

So what has that done that’s driven fuel prices?

What have we seen?

Well, we saw airline go bankrupt in the US just ahead of the World cup and there was this associated travel disruption risk.

We’ve seen a shortage of CO2 being produced as a byproduct from there.

So anyone in manufacturing with CO2 dependence, we’ve seen significant concentration in the airspace above the Gulf region and below Russia as a sanctioned country.

So we’ve got some very high concentration of air traffic control risk.

So it’s really to encourage people to think about, well actually not just what is this impact of this crisis to me today and tomorrow, but actually what is this doing to my business risk and the second and third order impacts over the next three months or six months.

That definitely throws up some interesting discussions.

So it’s personalize the risk to the organization and then think about not just first order impacts, but second and third order impacts as we go through.

Peter Steinfeld: Yeah, it seems like there’s just so many things that could possibly happen these days.

To your point, you almost have to make any planning you do for the future around the business itself include risk assessment that should just be natural.

Like you can’t leave that part out.

And then because you can’t plan for everything, you just have to assume the simple speculation that what if we just simply can’t do what we want to do in that place?

I don’t know what caused it.

It could be a million different things, but you have to take that all hazards approach to Just be ready to respond if you can’t do X where you want to.

James Henderson: And I think one thing to be careful of is that if we’re not careful, we can get ourselves into a very negative, very depressing place, which is we can’t do anything because it’s too risky.

And so one of the things we like to think about is this has to be a permissive risk.

We are assuming that you will continue to do the things that you want to do, but what we help you to do is actually help you to manage the risk of that.

Now you’re right that you will have a risk tolerance and that means that there may be scenarios where you go, actually this is now outside my risk appetite as an organization and I’m going to stop doing that.

And we have seen a little bit of that.

So there are businesses who have left the Middle east in the last six months and will not go back.

They’ve absolutely withdrawn significant numbers of their people and they’ve closed their business down.

So we do see a bit of that happening.

But more generally, our advice would normally be to say, let’s assume you’re going to run your business, let’s assume that your operations will continue.

But what we will do is help you to design additional controls around the risks that you might running or prepare, like I said earlier, which is, yeah, you may need to invest more in the preparedness for operating in particular regions.

Peter Steinfeld: How can organizations determine which of those ripple effects could affect its people or operations?

James Henderson: I think, Peter, this is another example where the personal responsibility comes back in.

So what I mean by that is there is a tremendous amount of really high quality analysis and intelligence that’s out there.

Helix, for example, produces an annualized risk radar report where we assess what those second and third order impacts are likely to be in various regions, various scenarios in the world.

And look, we’re not the only show in town.

As you know, there are other people also producing incredibly high quality content.

So my advice would be that people have to invest the time in reading and digesting that analysis and actually working it out for themselves.

And we can produce it, but we can’t make people read it.

So that’s what I would ask people to do.

Peter Steinfeld: Well, as we wrap up here thinking about those reports, what risks are most top of mind that you’re concerned about?

James Henderson: For me personally, it’s quite a personal thing.

I’m very thoughtful about the climate risk and the way that we’re seeing climate risk examples start to correlate strongly with medical and security examples and I’ll share an example with you from earlier this year where we got a call from an employee of a European client and they’re a traveling salesperson.

They were taking the company product to the US Market and they took a wrong turn in the middle of the wildfires that you were experiencing in California.

They found themselves going the wrong way down the wrong road with fire actually converging on both sides of them.

And in the panic that suddenly erupted on this road, people started ramming each other’s cars to try and get away.

This person was then quite severely injured in the leg because the car door was rammed.

And they exited the vehicle by a shopping mall that was being looted at the time.

And there were people who were armed and looting.

And so that call came in and in that moment when I talked about the triage a minute, we have a wildfire.

We have someone who is now actually quite seriously bleeding from their leg and they are now in a very hostile environment.

So when you bring all that together and you say, well, actually, is that a climate event, Is that a medical event, is that a security event?

But it’s the convergence of those climate.

And when we think about the super El Nino effect and all of the analysis that I’m reading from many, many people is suggesting that this is a very serious thing that we should be thinking about over the coming months.

So, yeah, again, long answer your short question, Peter, but I think the convergence of climate with other risks is something that I personally am spending a lot of time thinking about.

Peter Steinfeld: That’s an absolutely terrifying story.

And it just goes to show that we can’t take for granted how we used to think about things.

If you’re going to travel somewh, don’t use the same assumptions you used from five years ago.

You’ve got to look at the new data and look into the future and the predictions because that could change what you would do when you get there.

James Henderson: I completely agree.

Peter Steinfeld: Well, James, thank you so much for being on the show.

Really appreciate you sharing all your insight and wisdom.

James Henderson: Thanks for having me.

I really enjoyed it.

Peter Steinfeld: To learn more about James and his work with Healix, click the links in the episode description.

You can also watch the video Highlights on AlertMedia’s YouTube channel.

Stay safe out there.

Outro: Thank you for listening to the The Employee Safety Podcast from AlertMedia, the world’s leading provider of risk intelligence and response solutions. To learn more about how to protect your people in business during critical incidents, visit alertmedia.com.