As our world grows more complex, so do the inherent risks associated with travel. And while the duty of care owed by employers to their personnel is nothing new, that too has grown in scope and complexity, especially in recent years.
During this time, although we’ve become somewhat adjusted to it, staying current on COVID-related travel restrictions has become an ongoing responsibility for employers. It doesn’t matter if employees are traveling locally, countrywide or internationally – or if they’re on the road or in the air. You’ll need to monitor channels such as the CDC and State Department for everything from testing requirements and proof-of-vaccination to quarantine mandates.
In addition to the layer of complexity added by the pandemic, many other factors are in play, including increases in severe weather, active shooters, civil unrest and cyber crime. As these events become more common, they begin to fall into the category of “foreseeable risk.” What does that mean for organizations? Ultimately, you’re accountable for harm to employees during company time; being uninformed or unprepared for events such as these is no longer a passable defense.
Overall, today’s business environment necessitates both thorough planning and first-class supportive technology to achieve optimal travel risk management (TRM). Let’s take a look at how to accomplish it:
Two Critical Components
TRM requires a two-pronged approach that gives you eyes around the world and fail-proof response mechanisms:
1. Monitoring: Truly anticipating and preparing for risk requires real-time critical event intelligence that incorporates the proximity and movement of your people. Only then can you focus resources on relevant precautions and targeted, timely alerts.
2. Responding: Effective critical event response relies on operational preparedness. This means having processes in place to locate, communicate, assist and potentially extract your people, across borders, time zones and governments.
Common Mistakes and Their Consequences
While there are many approaches to travel risk management, some methods have been shown to fail time and again. Here are a few of the common mistakes:
- Limited scope: If risk planning and protection is confined to overseas travel, only a subset of employees receive attention. Yet your responsibility actually extends to all employees – whether on the road or at their home office – as well as their family members, your board, consultants, contractors, suppliers and even customers and visitors to your facilities.
- Unbounded scope: By contrast, an approach that gives equal weight to every critical event in every time zone can paralyze your security team. Without proper focus, the relevant information can be overwhelmed by noise, which slows your ability to pinpoint the relevant risks and renders your team unable to respond efficiently.
- Ad hoc: A program that relies on manual processes and disconnected systems can leave people anxiously awaiting assistance. When response teams are forced to call around to reach the right decision-makers, the process is impeded and valuable time is lost.
How We Fix It: Holistic and Modern AI-Powered Risk Intelligence
Better information leads to improved preparation. Inadequate travel risk management that only includes meager duty-of-care provisions leaves your personnel exposed and your organization legally vulnerable. It can also cause a loss of trust and a decrease in productivity. For example, employee anxiety can translate into hesitancy to travel or relocate. This could mean losing valuable face-to-face business opportunities.
Conversely, a robust TRM plan supported by AI gives your people the confidence to know they’ll always be informed and protected. Here’s how:
- Eyes on over 50 critical event types around the world: Only OnSolve® Risk Intelligence gives you this intelligence faster and with more clarity than previously thought possible.
- Single streamlined dashboard: Instead of patching together disparate systems, now you can integrate stakeholders across your organization. HR, training, logistics, facilities and your executive team can communicate and view each other’s status with ease.
- Context-driven reporting: The unique footprint of your travel plans, events, offices and logistics is interwoven into the data you receive, so you know exactly how it impacts your people, places and property.
- Continuous monitoring and reliable data sources: Risk Intelligence supports geo-fencing so you can map safe-zone parameters, which eases the uncertainty of operating in an unfamiliar environment. This data also enables you to make more informed decisions about additional protection measures such as GPS tracking and mobile-device panic buttons.
- Marriage of technology and services: Actionable intelligence pinpoints trouble spots so you can equip employees with tracking and emergency communications while simultaneously giving them control over their own privacy.
With artificial intelligence as the backbone of Risk Intelligence, your TRM plan becomes a holistic program that lives centrally and satisfies the needs of all departments within your organization. It integrates a full range of functions, including critical event detection, asset/employee correlation, training, pre-assignment briefings, travel planning, critical communications and two-way multi-modal communications. Ultimately, information that’s fast, clear and relevant makes you more effective at planning and delivering the right level of support and response. You don’t have to face risk alone when this valuable resource is available.
The OnSolve Difference
OnSolve fuses speed, relevance and usability to bring you the most accurate, actionable picture of your world, allowing you to protect your people wherever they are.
Speed: The time between when an event happens and when it’s picked up by your team is called “time to detect” (TTD). Rapid TTD makes a major difference in your ability to give advance warning to personnel, as well as how quickly those personnel can react to an event in progress. In a comparison of TTD, our AI-powered Risk Intelligence detected an event in just four minutes, whereas it took nearly an hour for a team of human analysts monitoring news sources. Relative to news, while social media has been shown to detect events faster, noise and biases impact its reliability. With Risk Intelligence, you get data that’s both fast and accurate.
Relevance: OnSolve Risk Intelligence connects to thousands of human-validated sources from government, weather and geological services, local and international press, and social media. Each data source is assessed, confirmed and regularly evaluated by an expert team of data scientists to ensure that organizations receive information that’s timely, relevant and of the highest quality possible. In addition, validity is reinforced by leveraging multiple data sources that are clustered together to create a comprehensive event profile.
Usability: OnSolve Risk Intelligence not only tracks critical events in real time, it maintains dynamic maps of your facilities, logistics and personnel movements. This gives you control center-level visibility so you have a comprehensive big-picture overview of your entire threat landscape. The intuitive interface saves precious time so you can focus on making informed decisions, rather than figuring out how to navigate the technology. This means you can warn of potential impacts, take proactive security measures and alert or extract personnel.
When Every Minute Counts™
You need every advantage to assure the safety of your people, no matter where they are in the world. Risk Intelligence helps you go beyond simply meeting the duty of care to your traveling personnel. Facilitate the safe and smooth conditions that build confidence and inspire optimal performance.
Learn more about the OnSolve Travel Risk Management solution.
