Even though many organizations are looking to cut unnecessary costs, business travel is expected to be making its comeback in 2024, possibly surpassing pre-pandemic levels according to GBTA’s Business Travel Index Outlook. Alongside this, employees are expecting a renewed sense of work-life balance during their travels. Since the adoption of remote work due to the pandemic, organizations will be expected to prioritize work-life balance, wellbeing and ensuring the safety of their employees – whether they are in the office, remote or traveling. GBTA has even cited that employee wellbeing is becoming as important as pay to many.
Organizations are looking to reduce costs and improve efficiency, and now will also be expected to prioritize employee safety and benefits that promote work-life balance. But what does this mean for those responsible for protecting employees?
The responsibility is often split between security and business continuity teams, and travel management and human resources teams. Pressure from executives to cut costs and increase efficiency, coupled with expectations from employees, may be easily solved through more collaboration in 2024 between these two functions.
Having a single solution in place that all departments can leverage for employee safety can better protect employees wherever they are.
But What Is the Solution?
Creating a partnership within your organization that encourages collaboration and support between your risk and travel teams can only increase your ability to protect your employees. This partnership creates the opportunity to share tech stacks, ultimately cutting costs for your organization, and improving efficiency by eliminating downtime when a critical event may place one of your employees in harm’s way.
Finding a solution that offers solutions for both teams is possible with a critical event management (CEM) platform. A CEM platform that offers both risk intelligence and travel risk management capabilities means you’re actively protecting your employees as a single team - rather than in siloes that may make communication between departments, and even travelers, difficult and less efficient. This makes it easy for all teams to see travel itineraries, employees' locations and more, all from one central location.
Having the ability to monitor and communicate with employees as they travel, manage itineraries and receive accurate and real-time threat intelligence data in one place is a great place to start when building a travel risk management program that is efficient and protects your bottom line – your people.
How to Build a Better Travel Risk Management Program
Build a better travel risk management program with OnSolve.
The Benefits of a CEM Platform for Security and Continuity Leaders
Security, business continuity and resilience leaders have been tasked with the challenge of protecting their people on the ground and have gone through many changes with the adoption of remote work. Some organizations now have employees dispersed across the globe, on top of facilities and assets. Risk professionals need to protect them all and keep operations running smoothly. This is complicated when employees are constantly on the move.
Today’s risk landscape is experiencing upwards of 10 physical threats occurring every minute, so security and business continuity leaders need a way to easily monitor all their assets and facilities. A critical event management platform with risk intelligence that leverages both artificial intelligence and human analysts empowers security professionals to easily monitor facilities, assets and people all from a single pane of glass – with a way to filter by risk type and risk severity to only receive the information you need.
Through a clear partnership with travel and HR professionals, you can proactively monitor areas where employees are traveling and create procedures for when an emergency occurs. This may save your teams precious time and help employees to safety.
The Benefits of a CEM Platform for Travel and HR Professionals
Now that business travel is expected to return, many travel management and HR leaders have assumed the responsibility of protecting their traveling employees and creating a corporate travel risk management program. A CEM platform with travel risk management capabilities can take this duty of care to the next level – aligning with what many employees are coming to expect.
While you may be responsible for planning itineraries or booking flights, finding the information you need around travel destinations can ensure the safety of your employees and provide them with peace of mind that they are in good hands. A high-performing CEM platform should empower you to provide your employees with travel reports that cite the level of danger and what to expect when traveling domestically or internationally.
Establishing a partnership with the security and resilience teams within your organization to create procedures around travel can ensure that there are always boots on the ground proactively monitoring for any potential risks, making it easy to re-schedule flights, change hotel bookings or direct employees to safety.
The OnSolve Difference
Bringing travel and risk professionals together is easy with the OnSolve Platform, offering both risk intelligence and travel risk management capabilities and a comprehensive, easy-to-use critical communications solution – so you can stay in contact with the employees you work so hard to protect.
With AI-powered risk intelligence through the OnSolve Platform, risk and travel leaders can easily filter thousands of data sources to receive information that only impacts their targeted locations or employees. With data ingested from tens of thousands of sources through artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as vetting from a team of human analysts, it’s easy to trust the data you’re getting is accurate and up to date – receiving alerts in as little as one minute after detection. Partnered with our travel risk management solution, risk and travel managers can have insights they need into destinations, travelers and itineraries all from the same platform in real time.
As you work to improve cross-departmental collaboration going into the new year, OnSolve can help you unify technology and spend for your organization by incorporating travel risk and risk management to ensure a comprehensive strategy for protecting employees wherever they are.
Want to Learn More?
If you’re interested in seeing the power of the OnSolve Platform for yourself, we are offering complimentary threat and vulnerability assessments to give you a view into what risks and critical events may be most impactful to your people, facilities and operations.
Contact us about receiving your own threat and vulnerability assessment.
