Best Practices for Employee Health, Safety, & Well-Being

Outside of managing your travel policy and knowing where your employees are traveling to ensure their safety, here are the top ten best practices to keep in mind for duty of care:

As the Vice President of Operations, a significant portion of my role is focused on the intersection of process, people and product. In the past few weeks, my team and I have devoted quite a significant amount of time to managing the duty of care processes available to TripActions users. Simultaneously, we’ve been experiencing the impact of the coronavirus on managing corporate travel for our own employees and their teams, leveraging our own product’s duty of care features to ensure our own employee’s safety and security.

Yesterday we launched an expanded suite of new duty of care features that give executives, operations and people teams, and travel managers the tools and flexibility we need to respond to global events in real-time, including:

• A live traveler map that shows where traveling employees are around the world
• The ability to communicate en masse and directly with individual travelers via the mobile app
• NEW: The ability to blacklist countries/continents for bookings, and limit travel to and within a given location
• NEW: A real-time coronavirus report that shows traveler impact, the latest news and updates
• Plus, TripActions global travel agents who provide proactive support to help travelers so they never feel stranded

In addition to the features and functionality of the TripActions platform that empowers us to ensure our traveling employees are safe and secure, here are our best practices for duty of care:

1. Know where your employees are located and traveling around the world, and ensure you are constantly updating your travel policy to restrict travel to unsafe locations.

2. Proactively create a crisis response team with representatives from HR, operations, corporate travel, internal communications and PR who form the plan, regularly run practice drills and come together to manage situations as they arise.

3. Create a real-time communication channel employees can use to ask questions; Ensure timely responses

4. Incorporate health, safety and well-being tips or public service announcements in regular all-hands updates and internal communications so all channels are covered and employees keep best practices top of mind.

5. Lean on mobile apps like TripActions, Twitter, and WhatsApp as emergency communication tools. In times of crisis, each of these apps are beneficial for real-time, low-bandwidth communication and geolocation.

6. Make it fun to follow policies and adopt internal tracking tools by gamifying and rewarding the right behaviors.

7. Encourage employees to work from home if they aren’t feeling well, and provide them with a self-care action plan (if symptoms get worse within 24 hours, see a doctor, etc).

8. Encourage dialogue between employees and their managers to address their personal threshold of concern, and the best course forward for upcoming business travel.

9. Monitor employee and corporate conference and event activity on a daily basis to reallocate time and budget in the event of cancellation or rescheduling of activities.

10. Update your enterprise IT security protocol on a frequent basis to combat the latest threats in cyber security, hacking, phishing, piracy, and all other network-related mayhem.

I’m proud of our team for taking their daily cues from TripActions users, and recommending solutions to improve duty of care for companies and employees around the world.

Learn more about how TripActions can help keep your employees safe here.

Safe travels.

Nina Herold
VP of Operations
TripActions

Still not sure you’re prepared for the impact of Coronavirus on the workplace? Click here to read the top 10 questions that mid-sized companies have about the virus—and get their answers.