As companies return to post-Covid business travel, HR may want to update policies to safeguard employees

Employees who travel for work report that health and safety concerns are still top of mind, according to a new survey from SAP Concur.

The survey found that 44% of global business travelers say health and safety is the biggest threat to business travel. Fifty-three percent of global respondents report needing to change work travel accommodations in the last 12 months because they felt unsafe, and 28% had to do so more than once. Among US workers, 70% reported needing to make a change because they felt unsafe.

Frank Harrison, regional security director for the Americas with World Travel Protection, said travel programs need to provide employees with pre-trip briefings and education on what’s at risk.

“An organization needs to understand how they approve travel, whether the process that they’re using is just strictly an administrative process or if they have a travel-centric program that’s focused on the individual...preexisting medical conditions, their resilience, their experienced trauma. They need to understand the destinations [to which] they are sending people, and they need to understand the activities that those workers are going to be doing,” he said.

Harrison said companies have returned to global business travel, but they’ve also reverted back to “dated processes” that don’t provide adequate risk awareness or educate travelers on local customs or health and safety issues.

Box-ticking. HR has a responsibility to protect employees who travel, and Harrison cautioned that people teams need to focus their policy on their employees doing the traveling, “not just…ticking the box,” especially when employees are traveling to areas of the world where the political landscape may be uncertain.

“From an HR standpoint, the critical enabler for an effective travel system is being able to communicate with your travelers when they’re out, being able to locate them—because as this world is changing, and events are very rapid now…when something goes wrong, an organization needs to know where other people are, how to locate them, and then how to support them,” he said.

Harrison suggested that in writing or reviewing travel policies, HR teams should bring in other business stakeholders, like someone in charge of workplace health and safety and a representative from finance.

LGBTQ+ travelers. The picture is dimmer for LGBTQ+ employees who may travel for work. In May, the Human Rights Campaign joined other advocacy groups in issuing a travel warning to Florida, citing new laws passed in the state that are hostile to LGBTQ+ people.

Harrison pointed to dozens of countries across the world that criminalize same-sex relationships.

“We’re looking at a changed landscape, where we’ve taken for granted that in North America, we are in inclusive societies,” he said. “We’ve now seen both in North America and globally, the emergence of far-right governments and movements, and these are creating very dangerous situations for persons who are openly LGBTQ.”

When sending LGBTQ+ employees or other at-risk groups out to parts of the world where their rights are not fully recognized by the host government, “there’s got to be a plan to support them, and especially from a medical perspective,” Harrison said.

“Travelers are demanding more from their employers,” he added. “[In] some cases, when a traveler receives their pre-travel awareness briefing, they may decide…it’s not safe for them to travel to a destination, and organizations need to be able to respect that, and they need to be able to honor the decision by the traveler.”