Duty of care programmes can be met with resistance for a variety of reasons, some of them active and some passive. The existing burden on staff to attend mandatory professional, CPD or compliance training already makes significant demands on available time. Accordingly, finding time to attend risk management training and read briefing documents or new policies can easily be squashed to the bottom of the priority pile.
But fundamental to the successful implementation of any duty of care programme is promoting awareness and generating effective adoption. It is important that we not only make people aware of what they need to be doing and how they should behave, but why all this is vital to their safety and indeed to the continuity of the business as a whole. Travel managers have to be selective and clever to get their messages across.
Some successful approaches include:
- Targeted communication campaigns with bite-sized messages that help people to understand how it affects them, why it is important and where they can go to find out more
- Easy to access e-learning which is interesting, or even fun, and which can be completed on a notebook or a smartphone at convenient moments. By managing this centrally via a learning management system, the travel manager can monitor progress and target individuals who are falling behind for extra help
- Implementation of a travel security approval process that is linked to expense reimbursement. For example, if the correct security process has not been followed, expense claims are held up
- Bringing campaigns to life with anecdotal examples of unfavourable consequences arising from failure to follow procedures or advice
- Using short crisis management exercises with senior decision makers to highlight where existing travel risk management systems may require a re-think or a redesign
- Keeping it real; we find that people often respond badly to scare tactics, so all communications should keep the threat in perspective. A company's travelling population can be disenfranchised or even deterred from travelling by over-enthusiastic trainers with tales of blood, mayhem and destruction
'Invisible' communications
If duty of care measures are too onerous or cumbersome, people will attempt to find ways around them or just refuse to comply. There are many ways of minimising the burden on the traveller and indeed making many of the measures largely invisible to them. For example:
Automated approval process: Some travel risk management systems have an automated security approval process that triggers a risk assessment for travel to higher threat environments or for particularly vulnerable travellers. This can be dynamically linked to the business justification approval for travel and connected up to the travel management company or booking engine. It can also generate recommended resilience measures to ensure effective duty of care compliance.
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Travellers can get bombarded by information so travel managers have to be selective ©milo827/iStock
Automated gathering of itinerary information: A system that automatically gathers travel and accommodation information directly from the travel agent or from the global distribution system (GDS) means that little or no effort is required from the traveller and therefore many of the procedures can be met by default.
Tightly focused information push: We find that travellers who are bombarded with large numbers of intelligence assessments and travel alerts very quickly reach saturation point and thereafter don't read any alerts at all. By tightly focusing alerts based on the individual's needs and their precise location, they realise that anything that they do receive is important and they therefore read and act upon it promptly. The medium for delivery should be suitable for the audience and there are many choices — text, travel app, email, social media etc.
Ease of compliance to requests: From time to time the travel risk manager needs individuals to carry out various activities such as confirm their arrival, confirm their current location or acknowledge a certain alert or indeed report their welfare status in a crisis. It is vital that these activities are kept to a minimum and only used when necessary. Moreover, they must be simple to complete, via a single click or a simple text/email response.
But you must truly be there for your travellers
Travel managers mustn't overlook the burden that these measures place on the organisation. In the vast majority of cases, companies do not have the luxury of a 24/7 travel security, intelligence or crisis response capability. In fact these activities often have a single point of failure as the responsibility invariably falls upon a small number of dedicated employees who keep their mobile phone on during out of hours periods. Some organisations rely solely on their travel management company for out of hours cover but there are very few TMCs that have appropriately experienced and equipped security/crisis professionals available, least of all outside business hours.
This situation is not only problematic during a crisis, where potential consequences of not being able to rapidly locate, communicate with and evacuate travellers are self-evident. Less obvious are the problems that this can generate in everyday operation.
If travellers know that no-one is monitoring the travel tracking, no-one is receiving their confirmations of arrival and no-one is monitoring events that may affect them then they will quickly lose enthusiasm to comply with the process.
Clearly it is very costly to solve this challenge from already stretched, in-house resources but there is a significant trend towards the outsourcing of this capability to achieve a truly dynamic travel risk overwatch. This has the direct effect of reducing risk, increasing confidence of the travellers and indeed significantly improving compliance levels.
An on-going process
Training is clearly not only very important at inception but should be a continuous revision programme to keep risk awareness front of mind to travellers. As the business and the risks it faces evolve, systems and procedures also need to change to remain aligned. Procedures, training and readiness should be tested by regular drills and exercises; this not only gives people confidence but ensures that measures are fit for purpose.
Your travellers can be at best an unpredictable and a weak link in your risk management chain and at worst an obstructive liability. It is vital to educate them so that they understand their part in the duty of care process and even more importantly that they understand why they are being asked to comply. Processes and systems need to be straightforward and not place too much burden on the individual — compliance needs to be effortless and easy.
Finally, travellers need to feel that their compliance is making a difference to their safety and to the success of the organisation. They need to be confident that the system works and that there is someone looking out for them at the other end of the line. If your travel risk managers do not have the time or bandwidth to do this, make arrangements with an expert organisation that does.