Duty of Care: Protecting Your Travelers Protects Your Bottom Line with Deloitte

Businesses balance many competing priorities. But no matter what else is stacked up against it, employee well-being tips the scale of importance every time. Over the past few years, employee wellness has taken center stage as leaders are increasingly expected to weave wellness into the fabric of their companies, which means creating a culture of care is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have. And that’s exactly why duty of care — an organization’s legal obligation to protect employees from harm — matters.

 

Keeping employees safe is, of course, the right thing to do. But it also makes good business sense. When business leaders create a safe environment for their employees, it establishes employee trust and loyalty, both of which help with retention. Beyond that, predicting risk, taking preventative measures, and responding quickly to crises helps maintain business continuity. The bottom line? Businesses are beginning to view duty of care as a strategic tool; a way to protect their workers while strengthening and sustaining their organization.

 

In this episode of the SAP Concur Conversations podcast, Oren Geshuri of Deloitte explores what it means to keep employees safe in a complex world and how top business leaders embed employee wellness into their travel programs and policies and incorporate duty of care into their company culture. 

 

You can listen to this episode on Apple | Amazon | Spotify | Google or your favorite place to find podcasts.

 

Read the transcript from this episode of the SAP Concur Conversations podcast below:

 

Jeanne Dion:

Hi, this is Jeanne Dion. I am the Vice President of the Value Experience Group here at SAP Concur. My team works with our customers to bring positive business outcomes based on data-driven insights. I'm here today with Oren Geshuri, who is from our Deloitte partnership. You may recognize Oren from a few other podcasts. Oren, would you like the go ahead and introduce yourself here?

 

Oren Geshuri:

Yeah, Jeanne. Great, thanks for having me here. Oren Geshuri, I've been around the block once or twice in these circles, but I'm looking forward to a great conversation today. This is one of the topics that are near and dear to my heart.

 

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah. Today's conversation is going to be based all around travel and looking at foundational elements to make our traveler well-being and traveler considerations stronger and create programs for further future-proofing our travel programs. Oren, when we think about traveler well-being, it's really taken a turn in the past two years. It started with the pandemic, but there have been a number of other things that are happening. When I think of this in sense of duty of care, I think of it as a broad term. I think of it related to business continuity, but really, when I think about that duty of care standard, it is changing rapidly in today's business world and in just the regular environment overall. Would you mind sharing with us a little bit about duty of care and if the standards differ across the world?

 

Oren Geshuri:

Absolutely. It's a great question. We truly live in a world of uncertainty more so than ever. Now obviously, generation-to-generation, they're going to say, "Well, I experienced the worst thing ever," but I think objectively, the world has become more crazy, especially with recent pandemics and things. Duty of care is a concept. It is really, really interesting. It's, essentially, if we can define it briefly, it's the obligation of an organization. We're talking about corporate travel here, so we're framing this in terms of the corporation. It's the duty of the organization to ensure the safety and we'll add in well-being of that traveler, of the travelers that they are sending out in the world on behalf of company business. That's the nutshell. Especially in the past few years, it's gotten a lot of attention because of all the COVID lockdowns and how everybody had to pivot to this work-from-home scenario and now extending some of that duty of care obligation to now that employee is working at home and they're performing work duties at home, so the line is blurred a little bit in the past couple of years.

We've seen across the world different approaches to how duty of care is handled. There are some countries, England, for example, they have the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act back in 2007, which is a great name. It's one of the better-named laws I've ever heard. But even in France, they have the Duty of Vigilance Act, and there are other countries around the world that are really starting to put some attention to this. Really, in those laws, it's talking more about negligence, even more about gross negligence, and so the duty or the standard of proof is based on that. But the US, though there's no federal law protecting or talking about this to some extent, there are different state laws, especially I'm in crazy California. California, when something happens in California, eventually it's going to bleed across the rest of the country. This really is becoming a focus of legislation to fill in the gaps where the organization has not brought to bear, basically.

 

Jeanne Dion:

Yep. In thinking of duty of care, the way that you've identified it, we've always thought about it from safety, but you mentioned the word well-being in there. We always thought about it, when I were in a program, it was, how do we help somebody who gets sick abroad? How do we help keep people out of danger? But as we look at the lens of travel now through equality and diversity and inclusion, this really becomes a bigger process. It's no longer looking to see, "Oh, there's a hurricane coming or a snowstorm." It's really looking at your employees, maybe their religion or their gender or their color or even sexual orientation. We've seen that recently in just recent world events. When you think about this, what are you seeing out there? Are there things that really come to mind to you at this point?

 

Oren Geshuri:

Well, absolutely. One of the biggest knock-on effects of the past several years of pandemic and other world events is actually in the mental health space. Mental health has truly been impacted. My wife and I were constantly talking about how people aren't acting like they used to. The kettle is boiling over, so to speak. There's a lot of frustration in a lot of places, and that has come to play in the relationship between employees and employers as well. We've just gone through a period, what we call The Great Resignation or The Great Reshuffling or whatever the great thing is. That was really a rebalancing of power between employee-employer, especially because employees realize that they might be able to take, wrestle control of their career.

They didn't have to stay in that mental health critical zone. Maybe they use that as a factor to look for another position, another job somewhere, or to renegotiate better terms where they are already working. That's been an interesting aspect of this. If we broaden this, you mentioned some recent world events, especially with some marginalized groups, World Cup, which we're currently in the middle of and I won't talk about any teams playing back and forth at this point, because it's been a lot of surprises. One of the interesting things is, since this is in Qatar, Qatar is a Sharia law nation, it is a Muslim nation, and it is de facto illegal to be in the LGBTQ+ community or to be openly as part of the LGBTQ+ community. We're seeing, right now, there are 69 countries in the world that, in some form, criminalize LGBTQ+ activity.

Now, some of those laws, maybe they date back to the 1800 and they just have never been stricken from the books, but the fact is they haven't been stricken from the books. They're right for exploration or right for being taken advantage of for political purposes or whatnot. Also, let's take a look at just other marginalized communities, the disabled who travel. The US, we have the ADA. George H.W. Bush signed that into law, and since then, there's been a slow movement towards making things more accessible. But that's the US, that's not happening in the rest of the world. There are a lot of countries who don't even think twice about it. They have high curves and things. There's a lot to be said for the company preparing their travelers, as they send them out into the world for various purposes, to think about what the destination is and what that particular travel's disposition, how they will be embraced or not embraced when they go to that country.

 

Jeanne Dion:

Right. Wow. Yeah. I think about that, you mentioned accessibility, that becomes really critical because the work-from-home and hybrid experiences that we've all been experiencing over the past two years have brought many, many more people into the corporate work world that may not have been part of it before. As we start to think about how we're working with our employees when we send them out to travel, this becomes a real critical challenge to spend maybe more on what we would consider before to be marginalized groups. Maybe the idea of how they're booking their travel or the type of travel or the type of room. Do we see that coming into play? How can companies actually get some assistance or think about that in ways that they hadn't thought about it before? Does it tie back directly to policy?

 

Oren Geshuri:

It absolutely does. I think organizations are going to need to start loosening purse strings a little bit, because there's always been this driving inclination to just say whatever the lowest cost is to travel, some exceptions here and there for various groups. I think, systemically, we need to reframe that conversation and say, to really be an inclusive travel program, an inclusive environment, we need to open up to all these marginalized not just disabled, we talked about LGBTQ+, women travelers have just as much of a challenge sometimes when compared to their male counterparts, even other marginalized groups. When I use the term marginalized groups, here in the US, we're probably talking about some of the minority groups in terms of race, but also gender. But in other countries, marginalized groups may be different. I don't want to say anything here that's going to be a blanket statement for marginalized groups, but let's just home in on a couple of these things.

For example, women travelers. What's interesting about, there was a study a couple of years ago by the GBTA, the Global Business Travel Association, about women travelers. More than 8 in 10 women, over 80%, like 83 some odd percent of women say that they've experienced some real safety-related concerns while traveling for business. They also believe there's a huge portion of this who truly believe that they face greater risk than their male counterparts, general safety risks, sexual harassment and assault risks. When they go to certain countries and cities, even assault and kidnapping, although that's maybe less of an actual risk, it is still a risk. When we adjust a policy to allow women to have a little bit more of a trusted trip, trusted travel, well, obviously, looking to book at trusted hotel chains, that's something, but consider the safety of the neighborhood.

We have a lot of tools at our disposal. There are great apps out there, one of them being GeoSure, that actually rate neighborhoods for various safety factors, female safety, LGBTQ+ safety, robbery safety, political activity safety. It pays to have that extra caution when booking travel to say, "Okay, this is where my hotel is going to be, or this is where the office is or my client is. I need to do a brief risk assessment and understand what are the risk factors as I go to that location." Looking for hotels closer to the work site, I'm sure most organizations have great negotiated rates with hotels near major offices, but that's not always the case. Airbnb is an interesting question and other, I don't want to pinpoint Airbnb, but other home-sharing type, property sharing type things-

 

Jeanne Dion:

And the rest, yeah.

 

Oren Geshuri:

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Even every hotel brand now, Marriott and Hilton, they all have an equivalent of this now. These are typically owned by individuals, and so there are certain ... we've all heard the horror stories in the news about cameras and other things in some of these shared properties, so we have to make sure that we curate the available property, is that we even target if we allow them in our policy, making sure that only top rated properties are allowed or looking at the security index of those areas. I think policies are key. In that study from GBTA, there was mention that over 2/3 of the women who travel for work are focused, think that their company should modify policy to specifically address those female concerns, but only 18% of policies really touch on it even. It's a big disparity.

 

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah. A lot of what you're talking about rings true. I've been traveling since I was young. Not going to say how old I am, but I was traveling since I've been young. I had never really thought about it until my actual manager came in and his wife constantly traveled for work. He recommended certain things to me. Stay in a hotel room that's close to the exit or close to the elevator area. Don't let anybody say your room number out loud. Don't let them even direct you to where you're going or even mention a floor that you're on, and I never really thought about that. He actually even had me order room service in certain areas because he didn't want me going out by myself in the dark in areas where we had to work because he was afraid for my safety, I was a single female walking down a street. Even though it was a decent area and there would be lots of crowds, he didn't want to expose me in that way.

It's fascinating that you say that because I recently read a study from Travel Guard that said 84% of people had said they weren't aware of any tools that would give them safety tips or that their employers didn't provide that kind of safety tip or resource. If we think about that, that's a huge amount of the traveling public that has that disconnect with how we keep people safe. I did want to jump back though to something that you had said earlier about the traveling and Airbnb. It triggered in my head, like I said, I traveled before when I was younger, when I was 26, I started traveling-

 

Oren Geshuri:

Before the sharing stuff was the thing.

 

Jeanne Dion:

Before the sharing stuff happened, yeah. My daughter is 26 and traveling for work now, and her safety concerns and the way that she travels and her generational view of how she travels and the tools that she uses are super different than when I went to travel. If I look back at travel programs, even if I look at my own travel policy here at SAP Concur, it's written for a certain generation of traveler.

 

Oren Geshuri:

Without exception.

 

Jeanne Dion:

That generation is moving out of the work world. Do you have any thoughts around that idea of how travel managers can future-proof that program, so that they're keyed into some of these new generational challenges as well?

 

Oren Geshuri:

It's a great question. In fact, I think in the podcast released on this feed just today by Ralph Colunga, talked a lot about generational travel. It's a super-interesting topic, especially as morals and social norms change from generation-to-generation. A perfect example, in the US, there are 7.1% of adults self-identify as a member of the LGBTQ+ community. But if you pinpoint just generation Z, which is currently the youngest generation in the workforce, 21% similarly identify. Whether it's a question of people being more comfortable about coming out or whatever the case is, the statistics are very clear that the younger generations entering the workforce, we're talking millennials had started, to some extent Gen X, but millennials for sure, and of course, Gen Z looking to the alphas after Gen Z.

It is, in the US, the most diverse, the most non-Hispanic, white mix of people that we've ever seen in the workforce. Now, by 2020 already, millennials and Gen Z were 50% of the workforce. By 2030, it's expected that the Gen Z and alphas are going to be in that same index. Most of our travel managers, and I'm not trying to cast aspersions here, but most of our travel managers in corporate America come from an older generation, boomers and maybe-

 

Jeanne Dion:

Boomer, millennial.

 

Oren Geshuri:

Yeah. Maybe even some Gen X in the mix there.

 

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah.

 

Oren Geshuri:

They might not have the same social framing as these digital natives and as these people who have grown up in a more egalitarian type of environment, a more inclusive environment. With that said, we're also seeing, we're in a state now where, if you look at the trans murder monitoring, we have a lot more trans activity than we ever have before. That project, there have been almost 400 transgender, gender-diverse people who were murdered between October 2020 and after, which is an increase from the prior year. There are certain countries where that is more prevalent, and by the way, the US is one of those countries. We need to inform our travelers, and awareness is really the key here. For any of these sort of groups, marginalized groups, that is the first step, awareness of what the issues are and understanding that there are others that maybe hold different beliefs and different things and that is in direct conflict with my autonomy or my "freedom", so that has to be part of the calculation.

 

Jeanne Dion:

When you think about that, I think about this. We've got a changing of the guard from a demographic perspective, we've got a change in the order of things within the general world view, women, people of color, LGBTQ+, we've got even native groups that are indigenous groups. When we think about that, how do we bring people who have not always had a voice or who we maybe not have seen from an overall perspective in pulling together policy? We may not have seen them at the table with us voicing their concerns, how would you recommend we bring those people into the process for our travel managers to really make a broader, more inclusive policy and program to future-proof the organization?

 

Oren Geshuri:

It's funny. When I engage with certain clients or I have conversations with people at conferences or whatever, I ask them, "Oh, when's the last time you dusted off your policy?" Most of them will say, "Oh, I did in the past year, a year or two, or something." "When was the time that you rewrote the entire policy from the ground up?" They say, "Well, for the past 20 years, it's basically been just minor modifications of the original one from back in the day." Gladly, none of them still mention seatback phones in airplanes, at least that's gone. A lot of them don't understand that, or maybe don't fathom that those types of old school, and I will call them old school, old school policies are de facto non-inclusive. Some of them are still written with different gradings of VPs and above get this and different travel classes, things like that, and that is just inherently non-inclusive.

There is a lot of effort to try and get some internal voice of the customer, and that is the thing that I have to recommend to everybody is, just set up a focus group, talk to some of your people, but don't just target necessarily your power travelers, because the power travelers, in an organization in the US at least, are probably of a certain demographic or at least predominantly of a particular demographic. Mix it up a little bit. Put an open call to all groups and say, "We really want to hear your experience in traveling on behalf of company business and how we can give you the tools to be safer and to have a better state of mind as you travel." First of all, the open calls, especially if you serve lunch, you know what I mean?

 

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah.

 

Oren Geshuri:

Definitely. You're going to have people flocking to help with you. The problem is, most travel programs, they just do things in a silo. Maybe the compliance person is there, maybe the legal person is there, but it's still basically a very small panel of people with very little input from the body population.

 

Jeanne Dion:

Really, it's a change in focus to not just dictate from the mountain how things should be, but to include from the bottom up to the top to ensure that everything is inclusive from the organizational perspective and get all those perspectives in there to have a better, more comprehensive policy and program that speaks to the actual needs of the employees, as well as to the needs of the organization.

 

Oren Geshuri:

Yeah. Some would argue that it is, and in fact, I also argue, that it is absolutely in the interest of the organization to bring in the voice of the employee. There is this inclination, or corporations are not democracies, so we don't need to necessarily have this egalitarian approach. But we've seen a shift in that balance of power. We talked about that earlier, Great Resignation and whatnot, and that is happening and continues to happen because some of the more traditional organizations are just not opening the mail. They're not reading the letter from the new generation saying, "We don't care for this," or, "We won't stand for this", right?

 

Jeanne Dion:

Right. Yeah. I think this all ties back to that recruitment and retention of employees, it's part of the employee experience. Organizations are inclined to tie almost specifically to cost measures. You can't have a black car, you can't be in business class, you can't spend more than X number of dollars, I don't want you eating from the mini bar, I don't want you ordering room service," and it's that idea now that maybe that cost is really costing you in a greater way for retention recruitment, for bringing people in and making them feel safe and comfortable. Are you seeing those thought processes where they're opening up to maybe allowing for black cars in specific areas where people are traveling or reducing or minimizing or taking away some of the restrictions around how people travel and what they can expense on the company's behalf? Are you seeing any of that happening? Are you seeing the start of it?

 

Oren Geshuri:

Well, we're definitely seeing it, and some industries might be a bit more open to that than others, some of the newer tech sectors. The TMT as we call it, tech, media, telecom, those are more open to some of those modifications. The more traditional sectors like financial services, in some cases, manufacturing, they're a little bit more resistant to that concept. I don't know if you remember a few years ago, there's a great thought leader in this area, Scott Gillespie, who talked about the total cost of travel, which is balancing the cost of travel against the overall well-being of the traveler, because there's a calculus there. Forgetting about marginalized groups for a moment, you send the 6'5" guy into economy class and he's going to have his knees shoved in his neck while he's traveling. That's not a great experience either.

The total cost of that travel, if you're too rigid on spending a little bit extra money where it would be advantageous, how much money are you going to spend retraining the person who you had to hire to replace the guy who quit? Before I was in consulting, I was in the entertainment industry. I worked at a few studios here in Los Angeles, and it was, I don't want to say common, but it was a fact that when a new executive, a VP, SVP, especially some hotshot coming from one studio to another, when they were coming into the studio and negotiating their package, they would often ask for a copy of the travel policy ahead of time and negotiate exceptions for themselves. Or sometimes they would look at a really horrible policy and say, "You know what? If this is how the organization is? Hard stop. Nope." They would just nope it. We're seeing a lot of that now. Maybe not to that extent, but you are seeing, especially millennials and Gen Z, who are joining organization, getting a feel for how rigid that organization is and just noping it.

 

Jeanne Dion:

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, I will say it's not just from the entertainment industry. I had worked in biotech. We actually had executives who did the same thing. They came in and they were just like, "I am not traveling this way. This is how I travel. This is the exception that you're going to make for me." I think that's probably more common than we think, and so we need to probably think about it on a broader scale. If that's what we have certain people coming in and asking for, maybe this is something we should consider from a larger perspective for the organization as a whole.

 

Oren Geshuri:

Yeah, absolutely. Making it more inclusive up and down but also, I think plenty of studies, I don't have any statistics off the top of my head, but there are plenty of studies that show that investment in travel actually improves your overall bottom line, in terms of sales, revenue, et cetera, et cetera. There is a definite benefit to making a trade. You might be spending a couple of dollars more, but the overall impact to your employee is going to be immeasurable.

 

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah. You mentioned something earlier, and I'd like to bring it back to something that we just spoke about. You talked about the cost of travel from Scott Gillespie, but I also think about it as it relates to well-being. You talked about you and your wife having those conversations about people's mental health and that stress that people are feeling. Everybody's at that point about ready to bubble over.

 

Oren Geshuri:

Yes.

 

Jeanne Dion:

We've seen all the news articles about people attacking flight attendants, people going berserk in airports, people just losing their minds over things that may not have caused that type of reaction in other travel times. As we think about our employees' mental health and the cost of travel to them as a person, do you have any recommendations for organizations about what they should keep in mind as they're building out their policies for the future?

 

Oren Geshuri:

It just so happens that some of the rules that might reduce the mental stress around travel can also be part of a sustainability agenda as well. A great example is the number of layovers a person has to have. A lot of times an organization is going to say, lowest logical airfare, which is going to route me through Albuquerque or wherever it is, nothing against Albuquerque. But the thing is, the more legs on a flight you have or on a trip you have, that's more carbon footprint and more stress to the traveler. You can kill two birds with one stone in a way.

But if you expand the thought process, people need to, as they're traveling, there are a lot of pressures. I'm a road warrior, I know about this, and I just happen to be stubborn, so I just roll with the punches. A lot of people, they want to go workout at the gym at the hotel, which might cost a little money. Who cares if they pay $10 bucks for the day? A lot of hotels include it, and I have seen recently, policies slowly starting to allow it, but it's by no means common yet, things like that. Unless you're a government contractor or something, I want a glass of wine with my meal, is that so bad? So, what?

 

Jeanne Dion:

Right.

 

Oren Geshuri:

TSA Pre, that's a great example, and I'll include global entry. Other countries have different equivalents, but this is essentially from the ability to bypass some measure of security or at least to skip forward. They just reduced the price on it too. It used to be $80, now it's $75 for five years. Why would a company not pay for this? It boggles my mind.

 

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah, it's an amazing investment from a time perspective, and it also gives your employee the sense that, "Hey, they care about my time, they care about the fact that they're making me leave home to do something on behalf of the company, and I really feel a loyalty to them because they're taking me into consideration."

 

Oren Geshuri:

Yeah, exactly so, but let me add. It's also about that company proactively, or that organization, I'll say, proactively providing information. Really, it is about information. A great example. We have disabled travelers, people who might need some special accommodations going to countries that may not comply with what we think of as accessibility. Well, there's a great organization, Mobility International, they have a website, you just go to the website and you can look at most countries around the world and it'll show you how that country handles accessibility and what their thought and their moray is and different things around that. Just telling your traveler, your disabled traveler about the site is a step in the right direction. Just arming them with the tools, whether it's the State Department website or your own internal resources just for that employee, for that traveler to give them enough information to do a little mini risk assessment that makes them comfortable with the travel.

That goes a long way, and a lot of companies don't even do that. They don't even mention it. If you're traveling, they might have the indicator when they, booking travel, "Oh, you're going to such and such place that requires a visa or whatever," but it doesn't say, "Oh, you happen to have, in the US, this new gender marker X," which is now available, but most countries in the world don't recognize that. When you go to this country, how is that going to apply or how is that going to come into effect?

 

Jeanne Dion:

Yeah. Wow. Okay. I could talk to you all day.

 

Oren Geshuri:

Yeah, seriously.

 

Jeanne Dion:

We could talk for hours, but we probably do have to wrap it up, I want to be mindful of your time. If I could just summarize what we're talking about. It's really that review of policies as you relates to travel for inclusion, making sure that everybody in your organization has consideration in how they travel and where they're traveling to. The other piece of it is in information, information, information. We need to share resources, we need to make sure that our traveling employees and our employees who only travel on a minimal basis, whether you're a road warrior or somebody who only takes two trips a year, that they know where the information is, they have access to the information, and we as travel managers are providing it to them.

Then finally, it's that idea of cost over value. It's that idea of, yes, this is going to save you money, so from a cost perspective, it's being very cost-conscious. But what do you lose in value? Are you losing your employees? Are you losing the ability to be more sustainable? Are you losing the chance to set yourself up as a market leader or a market forerunner for how business is going to be working in the future? I think that's what I've gained from our actual conversation.

 

Oren Geshuri:

Absolutely. Yeah, you nailed it all. I would just say, I would actually implore travel managers to take a moment and just step in the shoes or imagine yourself in the shoes of some of these groups that we've talked about today and what their travel experience is like. I know it's difficult for me sometimes to step out. I'm a cisgender white dude, big hairy white dude, so I don't have a lot of things against me societally speaking, except when I travel, I have experienced stuff. It's not just for the people we've talked about today. It really is creating a program that sets the stage for all of your folks, all of your travelers, to be safe, to be secure in their own self and to grow the company as a true leader in advancing the agenda of all your employees.

 

Jeanne Dion:

Yep. You said it much better than I did. Thank you so much.

 

Oren Geshuri:

Well, thank you.

 

Jeanne Dion:

Thank you for your time today, Oren. We really appreciate it, and hopefully, we can have you back again to talk about any number of other topics as it relates to travel. I really do truly enjoy, and I know that our listeners enjoy listening to you as well. You're really a wealth of knowledge. Thank you so much for your time today.

 

Oren Geshuri:

Thank you so much for having me. I love doing these things. I'm a nerd on a lot of topics, so happy to participate.

 

Jeanne Dion:

Fellow nerds unite.

 

Oren Geshuri:

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, when I was in school, nerds were always like, "Oh, you're such a nerd." Now, nerds rule the world, right?

 

Jeanne Dion:

That's right. That's right. That's exactly right. For everybody else, thank you so much for listening and we really appreciate it, and on behalf of SAP Concur Conversations, I'm Jeanne Dion. We hope to hear you the next time in our conversation.

 

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