Important Considerations When Creating and Executing a Duty of Care Benefits Strategy
Organizations with a global presence — whether international NGOs (INGOs), universities, or multi-national corporations — send employees (and students) around the world, which is inherently risky. Even seemingly “safe” common destinations come with their own risks. As an institution, you can never ensure anyone’s safety, but you do have a responsibility to demonstrate that you’ve taken steps to mitigate those risks — or, as we call it, you have a Duty of Care.
Understanding your duties and responsibilities — both moral and legal — to the people traveling under your organization’s umbrella can be complicated, but years of working with INGOs and universities have given our team a unique insight into the risk you must assess and how to prepare to ensure your people and your organization are covered.
Creating a Duty of Care benefit strategy
When you start to think about your Duty of Care strategy, there are three main questions to ask that will inform everything you do afterward.
1. Where does your organization take travelers?
Take your time to think deeply about this question. Even if you only have staff or students traveling domestically, it’s still worth thinking about what would happen in the case of a natural disaster, an active shooter situation, or even a severe illness while away from home.
International travel brings other questions, and the risks may differ depending on where your travelers are headed. In the Middle East, college students may need to know that public intoxication is against the law, while in certain cities or countries, the bigger concern may be about medical emergencies in the absence of an advanced healthcare system. In Europe, travelers may need special training on the risks of pickpocketing, especially if they don’t have experience in big cities.
Every risk category — medical, security, environmental — is present in every location, but the level of risk and prominence can vary widely, and that should impact your Duty of Care plans.
2. Who will be traveling?
It is increasingly important for organizations to understand who will be traveling. For instance, if you’re sending a member of the LGBTQIA+ community to Liberia (or a number of other countries that outlaw same-sex relationships), it’s important that they know about the political climate they will be walking into. The United States State Department warns, “Remember you are subject to the laws of the country where you travel. In many countries, consensual same-sex sexual activity, public gathering, or dissemination of pro-LGBTQIA+ material—among other things relating to sexual orientation, gender identity, expression, and sex characteristics—may be illegal.” Increasingly, these kinds of warnings may be necessary for travel within the U.S., especially for members of the transgender community. Risks may also be heightened for women traveling solo or pregnant women. So be sure you consider all the angles.
If you are a university, your Duty of Care is higher for undergraduate students than it is for faculty, for example. Additionally, you may have a higher level of responsibility for someone traveling outside of their home country or country of residence than you do for someone traveling domestically. This may also impact how you convey information. For employees, it may be sufficient to share a document or link regarding risks, but for students, you may be expected to share that same document in addition to presenting the information in a pre-departure session.
3. What is your community standard?
Preparing for the worst-case scenario may seem pessimistic, but it’s critical. Having a Duty of Care strategy isn’t a silver bullet — no matter how hard you try, you won’t be prepared for every possible scenario — but you can follow the best practices of your industry. You must be thinking about the “community standards” of Duty of Care. What are the other organizations within your “community” doing to safeguard their staff/students?
Both INGOs and universities tend to be very collaborative and willing to share what they do and provide examples. For some, that may simply be a matter of informing travelers about the risks they may face. For others, you may also need emergency evacuation plans in place, and to give your travelers the right emergency contact information.
Compare what that “standard” is to what you are doing. This is a critical step to determine what you may have to do to achieve a perceived minimal level of Duty of Care. We suggest creating a working document highlighting best practices within your community and then seeing how your organization compares. This best practice can summarize adopted policies, products, services, and/or programs adopted to help safeguard constituents. There may be organizations for your industry that more explicitly establish community standards.
Once you have answered these questions, it’s time to move forward to execute a plan. In reality, you’ll probably have to answer these questions repeatedly, but with the building blocks of a solid strategy in place, you can be sure you are prepared for any possibility. Working with a partner like Allegiant Global Partners is a good first step toward determining your community standard.
Executing your Duty of Care
Once you have a plan in place, it’s time to execute that plan. This will look different for every organization; however, there are a few common steps every organization will need to navigate along the way.
Get buy-in from stakeholders
If your organization is new to the idea of Duty of Care, the biggest challenge may be getting buy-in. You may hear, “We’ve been doing this for 20 years, and it hasn’t been a problem.” This may be true, but as the travel landscape changes, it’s imperative that organizations understand their potential exposure. Depending on whom you are trying to convince, the moral, legal, or financial angle may have more weight.
Using past experiences and data is a great way to gain “buy-in” for adopting a policy and or making changes. For example, several years ago, a student was assaulted while studying abroad. They were in their room in a shared house with a lock on the front door but not the individual rooms. The student eventually won a lawsuit because it was not the first time this happened, meaning the school should have known there was a foreseeable risk. Morally, legally, and financially, this institution was implicated in neglecting its Duty of Care.
Find the right Duty of Care solution for your needs
covered. In the INGO world, we consider this your “fiscal duty of care,” which safeguards donor dollars in the case of a pricy medical emergency. You don’t want precious donations going to an Once your organization understands its potential responsibilities in the worst-case scenario, you can decide what level of coverage is needed. That could mean anything from informing travelers of the local customs and nuances before they take a short trip to providing full coverage for people on extended stays.
Having the right insurance coverage is just the start of ensuring you have your Duty of Care expensive evacuation and medical treatment when it could have been covered by proper planning.
Ongoing organizational oversight
The real work begins when it’s time to synergize an organization’s needs and wants with the assistance and security, and insurance vendors. This process isn’t as clear and easy as it sometimes appears, which is why this is where we spend most of our time when it comes to Duty of Care.
As any large organization knows, ensuring the right hand knows what the left is doing is tough. That gets exponentially more complicated when you are dealing with multiple vendors, each charged with different aspects of ensuring your travelers are covered. In the case of an emergency — or even just a run-of-the-mill claim — it’s important to have a designated person (or a partner like Allegiant Global Partners) to orchestrate the process. We have instances where a traveler has gotten a notice that they are due for a routine dental cleaning and contacted the assistance vendor to be transported to a place where that’s possible. Wanting to help, the assistance vendor agreed, only to later find out that the insurance policy did not cover this. Simple misunderstandings like this can be avoided with the right expertise.
If you’re lucky, the worst your organization will ever have to deal with is a misunderstanding over a dental cleaning, but being prepared for the worst means having a plan in place for your organization and its travelers to follow. Whether you are part of an INGO or a university, if you have a long history of organizational travel, it’s likely you have already encountered one emergency. If that wasn’t enough to convince you to implement a Duty of Care strategy, let this be your wake-up call.