Gain an understanding of salient reasons why your company should have a Travel Risk Management Program as part of corporate travel and business sustenance measures.
Travel Risk Management has always been critical to corporate travel — a fact that the Covid-19 Pandemic further emphasized. Suppose you have a company and people who work under your supervision. In that case, you should be aware that every time your employees travel on business, they’re often exposed to a flurry of health, safety, and security risks from which they need to be protected. You get to do that through a Travel Risk Management Program.
Before delving into why you need a Travel Risk Management Program, let’s take a look at what it is:
What is a Travel Risk Management Program?
A Travel Risk Management Program anticipates, prevents, and reacts to dangers business travelers may face on their journeys. This can include dangerous weather, social unrest, terrorism, natural disasters, public health events like pandemics, etc.
Travel risk management means identifying and preparing for all the risks that come along the way. You have two main objectives: to decrease the chance of a threat materializing, if possible, and to have a plan in place in case a threat does materialize.
It’s easy to tell any company they should have a travel risk management program, but why is it important? Here are ten reasons that can provide the needed clarification:
Duty of Care
As an employer, you have a duty of care to your employees to facilitate safe business trips and travel plans for them, and having a travel risk management program in place provides your company with the capacity to evaluate foreseeable and unforeseeable risks to avoid injury to employees and legal ramifications for the company.
Risk Intelligence
A Travel Risk Management Program allows your company to undertake solid risk assessments for high-risk regions to evaluate traveler safety.
The potential threats covered in such risk assessments include political instabilities, natural disasters, regional endemic diseases, crime rates in the region, country-level entry requirements, and limited/non-existent rights for the LGBTQIA+ community, among others.
Apart from these, the assessments would also cover each traveler’s profile. For example, does the employee or team member have any medical conditions they might require care for during the trip? Does their gender or religion place them at a higher risk in the travel destination country? How do they intend to be transported, and how would the travel itinerary affect the employee?
These assessments will then present your company with travel risk intelligence — in other words, risks that you can plan ahead of and deal with before your employee leaves for their destination.
Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity is the fastest-growing source of travel risk, and most cybersecurity experts agree that about 20% of travelers are subject to cybercrime abroad. These attacks are often targeted toward accessing sensitive company data through public wi-fi and the installation of spyware.
Having a travel risk management program can help prepare ahead of such attacks and prevent them from taking place through concocted measures for mitigating cyber risk like the employee turning off or locking their phone or tablet at airport security, avoiding accessing sensitive data and networks when traveling, limiting remote access to their devices, etc.
Executive Protection
If need be, your employee may need extra physical protection in the destination they’re headed to. This could be due to the employee’s position in the company or something in their profile that puts them at an increased level of risk during and after their travel.
In such instances, having a travel risk management program could highlight the need to hire Executive Protection services for such an employee to ensure their security on all fours throughout their venture on the company’s behalf.
Executive Protection covers both physical and digital protection, so it’s always a welcome security measure for protecting employees that may be high-value targets for cyberattacks, cybercrime, assault, and harassment.
Monitoring employees
It’s one thing to put things in place to keep your employees safe when they travel; it’s another to ensure they’re safe after traveling. And that’s what having a travel risk management program brings to your table.
Through a travel risk management program, your company will have the capacity to keep traveling employees safe wherever they may be. Be it through a location tracker or intuitive interfaces that allow them to receive real-time alerts about emerging threats or live incidents in their localities that could impact them; your company can virtually travel alongside the employee as they work wherever business takes them.
Threat Awareness
A travel risk management program also increases your company’s awareness of threats, risks, and vulnerabilities employees may face during travel and wherever your business takes them.
This program will constantly examine your risk management strategies, highlighting any flaws and how your company can improve them. Also, through non-stop monitoring of live incidents and emerging threats, you get access to thousands of risk data sources.
Access to cost-saving measures
When things go wrong for travelers, the cost to receive expert help can quickly add up – especially if they’re in a foreign country. Expenses can quickly skyrocket if the traveler lacks proper support or knows which providers to seek.
A travel risk management program will present your company with international connections and long-standing relationships with medical, security, and travel professionals who can provide employees with the care they need at a reasonable price.
Staff Enlightenment
As mentioned earlier, keeping your employees safe during their travels is your responsibility as the helm of affairs at the company. However, in keeping your employees safe, they must be aware of impending dangers at their destinations first, and they can have that through a travel risk management program.
With such a program, employees can get valuable tips and guidance before traveling to a particular destination; they’ll also be well-equipped to handle unexpected events and gain seamless access to real-time alerts that help handle emergencies.
Regulatory Compliance
If your company is an international one employing a large number of workers abroad, having a travel risk management program is a must. The company must demonstrate proper management of increased crises and critical situations involving their employees abroad.
Particularly, there may be specific laws that your employee may be subject to in another country or city that you need to consider as it affects their safety and business. A risk management program helps you identify these regulations and work around them.
Dealing with incidents properly and professionally
Incidents can affect the safety of your traveling employee at any point in time, whether due to ongoing political instability, health threats, issues with accommodation security, or female-employee safety. These incidents often come as emergencies and will require expert handling to be quieted down. This can easily be achieved with a travel risk management program in place.
With such a program, your company would already have the needed risk intelligence to anticipate any incidents affecting the employee’s safety, and contingencies would have already been determined in handling such situations if they ever arise. So having this program gives your company the capacity to handle any rising incidents properly and professionally while, in the end, ensuring your employee’s safety.
Are you looking to create and maintain a tip-top travel risk management program for your company? Well, at Security Pro, you get your one-stop shop for precisely that.
We’re in the business of researching and connecting you with the best professionals in the field of travel risk intelligence. The companies we work with have intelligence experts that can meticulously assess travel risks for company employees and point out rising concerns to be addressed before they travel. We also work with companies well-versed in establishing travel risk management programs for companies needing such services.
So what are you waiting for? Book a free consultation with us or contact us to get started; we’re waiting on you.