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TRAVEL RISK MANAGEMENT 2015
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Q4 In practical terms, how do you handle Travel Risk Management in your daily activities? What is (are) your biggest challenge(s) and what are the solutions you’re looking for?
We have a speciic intranet page where we advise on diferent elements of travel: what to do in an emergency, telephone numbers, and alerts and so on. We take advice on risks. For example, there are certain high-risk areas which can only be visited as an absolute necessity and with the agreement of the board. Maintaining this currently depends a lot on me as the risk manager, and I am looking at ways of bringing in others. Of course, we do not know everything, so we look for support from specialised organisations like International SOS or Control Risks to structure our programme and give the personnel the necessary support.
I believe it is a shared responsibility between management and the personnel. It is also important that the traveller understands what kind of risk he or she could confront.
Q5 What best practices you would share with a risk manager starting the process in his/her organisation and what advice would you give?
I prefer the expression good practice to put in place a speciic health, safety and security policy. We have a travel policy; today we need to go a step further and introduce the notion of “duty of care”. We look for support from systems that can give regular advice and updates so that we can evaluate the speciic needs and be up to date in our analysis of the hazards. We want a broad opinion so that we avoid too much subjective analysis. We need a strong policy with advice, and not only that, but strict rules about following the advice. For the company, it is part of our duty of care, and for the traveller, it is part of respect and loyalty for the company.
Q6 How do you justify to your senior executives that Travel Risk Management programmes are a worthwhile investment in the short and long term?
I put it to them as an investment, not a cost, an investment with a return. This is an engineering company and our engineers’ brains are our greatest assets. There is also the argument that we are more and more visible, and we need to be able to show that we are fulilling our duty of care.
Q7 Can you give us an example where your organisation had to deal with a Travel Risk Management issue? How did you handle it? What lessons did you learn from it?
In the summer 2014, we had activities with supervisors on site in Kurdistan in Iraq. The situation became dangerous with the ofensive by Islamists, and it was diicult to have right information from the ield. Despite pressure from our client, we decided to evacuate our personnel on site. Our philosophy is always the same: protect our employees irst before any commercial consideration.
Q8 Can you tell us a key (recent) initiative taken as part of your travel risk and emergency management system?
Some of our employees used “blacklisted” airline companies without taking into account the risk for themselves, but also for the reputation of the company. In agreement with the travel agency, we put in place a quick procedure in order to avoid such a situation occurring again.