Everyday thousands of employees travel to both domestic and foreign destinations in order to conduct business. These business travellers depart to varied locales, some risky, some not. No matter where their destination, everything goes well 100% of the time because companies have insurance, correct? Not even close.
In fact, although insurance policies are necessary, solely relying on them is ill-advised, as they are reactive in nature. To best meet duty of care standards, risk mitigation requires proactive consideration. Responsible companies must collaborate with travel risk management (TRM) entities on travel risk analysis and crisis management plans before an incident ever appears on the proverbial radar. This is important for a variety of scenarios but for the purpose of this article, I will focus on evacuations.
Risk appetite
Understanding your organisation's risk appetite is requisite in preparation for evacuations. Benchmark events precipitate most security-type evacuations (natural disasters excluded). Organisations must determine specific actions to take at different benchmark events. When establishing your organisation's risk appetite, consider decisions such as when to defer travel to that specific geographical location, when to evacuate non-essential personnel and when to evacuate essential personnel at workplaces affected by an event. No organisation should be evacuating all of their personnel at the last minute; identifying key personnel and assigning them with decision-making responsibilities to ensure these benchmark plans are followed is pertinent.
Insured evacuations
Many insurance policies include third party providers that specialise in security and evacuations. Unfortunately, policies covering security-type evacuations typically stipulate non-coverage for third-party evacuations unless a government body (eg US Department of State) issues a statement requiring evacuations from a given location. Medical responders tied into other insurance policies (eg Business Travel Accident) typically require a doctor's review stating an evacuation is medically necessary. Organisations must understand their policies for decision-making abilities and should collaborate with TRMs that can retain their policies and action an insured evacuation in accordance with the organisational risk appetite. Enabling response providers through the provision of accurate information via a centralised communication control saves time and can be the differentiator between life and death.
Uninsured evacuations
Most organisations do not want to wait until the last minute to evacuate their people but, as aforementioned, many rely strictly on reactive insurance policies. Collaborating with TRMs can help expand organisational evacuation opportunities immediately as the TRMs can leverage their global relationships with third party providers to allocate available assets for immediate utilisation. TRMs not tied to one specific response provider can probe the service capabilities of different providers based on the client organisation's requirements (eg asset needs, price point, etc) in order to produce an evacuation plan that achieves the client's objective, albeit with an out-of-pocket expense.
Other considerations
Risk appetite will change from organisation to organisation, but it is important to keep in mind that not all situations require an evacuation. Deciphering the need for an evacuation oftentimes requires hiring a TRM. A good TRM will be able to assess the situation and determine if alternate responses are feasible based on their client's risk appetite. Three example solutions are as follows:
- Contact the client's travel provider and change a traveller's flight time to an earlier commercial flight so an 'evacuation' is not needed
- Contact the security/evacuation third party responders tied into the client's insurance policy and determine if moving employees to a safe house would be a feasible option
- Contact the medical responders tied into a client's insurance policy and determine if there is an appropriate medical facility nearby that can offer equal, if not better, medical services than the hospital to which an evacuation would be conducted as per the client's desires. This would give the client an option.
Conclusion
This article has been written in a very broad stroke intended to inform individuals of the overarching themes needed to plan properly for potential evacuations, security or otherwise. Crisis management plans, to include evacuation plans, are much more detailed and need to provide attention to the tiniest of details that could not all fit here. Travel risk management entities that can help write these policies as well as provide a single, unique telephone number so that they may provide appropriate incident management for any type of event, including any type of evacuation, should receive serious consideration by organisations small and large. These entities specialise in incident management so client organisations can maintain their focus on the specialties of their industries. No employee, regardless of where they fit in an organisation's hierarchy, should have the responsibility of deciding whether to evacuate somebody or not during an incident.
By then it is too late.