A recent webinar by the Global Business Travel Association explores how to navigate business travel risks using technology and employee feedback. Photo Credit: Adobe Stock/IRStone
The Covid-19 pandemic changed the game for business travel risks,
forcing companies to reassess how much time and effort they put into not
just setting expectations around travel risk, but also raising
awareness.
A webinar, hosted earlier this month by the Global Business Travel
Association, examined how to identify and assess business travel risks,
the use of technology to support employees in the event of a crisis and
the importance of regularly reviewing and updating travel risk
management policies.
Make people’s lives easier.
Whatever system is put in place to assess and manage business risks has
to be easy to understand and implement, otherwise the rate of adoption
will be low. “Even if you have great rules and even better applications,
you will still have that additional challenge of education,” says Alex
Rodriguez, director, global security communications center at The Walt
Disney Company.
Acknowledge company culture. You also need to look
at the culture to really understand how best to integrate your product –
this means explaining it to employees using language they are familiar
with.
“Decide whether you approach business travel as a ‘business enabler’ –
whereby you provide a pre-travel briefing in a more relaxed manner, or
whether you have a very compliant travel base, where your employees know
what resources are available [for corporate travel],” says Kevin
Reagan, director, travel risk management solutions at software company
Everbridge.
Adapt how travel risk assessments are delivered.
Email, in person, informal conversations …mix and match a range of
methods when assessing your employees’ travel risk, depending on what
they respond better to. “Some [standard] areas we have to check with
everyone, on a yearly basis for example, whether they are travelling or
not, but for those individuals making actual journeys, we ask our
employees what they think about our messaging and how they would like to
receive it,” adds Rodriguez.
Making sense of post-travel feedback. Panellists
suggested that getting feedback post-travel is one of the most important
aspects of assessing what works and what doesn’t work. And while you
can't sit down with every single person when they come back from their
trip and ask about their hotel and flight experiences, you can use
technology to get into levels of granularity, assessing risk ratings
depending on destination or issues encountered.