7 Steps to Travel Success: Duty of Care

Travel helps businesses and their employees to be successful and profitable. Nowadays, companies can’t afford not to have their workforce on the move. But when business travel becomes more frequent, duty of care issues, legal obligations and personal injury risks become more common too.

There are plenty of reasons to ensure that the best interests of your employees are taken care of, and you're offering an appropriate standard of care. Ensuring that your business follows employment law and employees avoid foreseeable harm is good practice for your business. In addition to personal safety issues that your employees may encounter, you also need to consider emotional harm and mental health. 

Reasonable standards need to exist to keep your team away from potential harm, both as your ethical duty but also to ensure you avoid a negligence action against your business.

So where do you start? Well, keeping track of changing itineraries, knowing where your employees are and being able to communicate with them are travel pressures for every business.

Alex Craxton, EMEA Product Manager for Concur Locate, and Steve Banks, Director of Business Development at Capita Travel and Events, discussed duty of care during a webinar in our 7 Steps to Travel Success series.

Here’s just a taster of some of the questions they answered…

• Defining Your Policies: How can you make it clear to employees what is and isn’t within your business travel policy? How can you capture all the data required for complete itineraries – even when they book direct with suppliers? What are the implications of gaps in your data? Have you taken reasonable measures to ensure your duty of care obligations are met to the highest level?
• Expecting the Unexpected: Have you identified a crisis management team? Do you know what your legal responsibility is? Who from the business is involved? Have you carried out risk assessments? Who is responsible should communications need to go out? Often, the decision making is down to several different areas of the business – are they and your communication channels aligned in case of an emergency?
• Getting in Touch: You might know how to contact your employees, but it’s just as important that they know how to contact you. Who do they call in an emergency? Who do they contact for a simple query? Do they feel protected and cared for?

If you want to know more about your legal duty and key factors to consider when it comes to duty of care, you can listen to the full duty of care webinar on demand.