“Duty of care” goes well beyond safety

I recently asked one of my friends from the UK about one of the most sensitive topics known to man: his taxes. He’d spent around 70 days or so in Australia for work over the past few months, and I was curious what this meant for his income status. “Are you legally a tax resident of Australia now?” I asked him. “To tell you the truth,” he replied me, “I don’t know.” The best bit: he’s a lawyer!

I suspect that my friend is counting on his company to evaluate his travel patterns and inform him if he is indeed liable to pay Australian tax. I also suspect that finding out he had to would still come as a rather nasty shock. His expectation would be that the company should let him know well in advance if their plans for him would result in an extra tax bill, and who would foot it if so.

My friend’s case illustrates the new duty of care that companies are expected to exercise for their frequent-flyer employees. Part of that duty of care obviously includes safety, as my colleague Laura pointed out from her experiences at SAP Concur. But it also includes many other factors, from my friend’s tax liability issues to rapid contingency planning if some incident – a volcano erupting in Bali, for example – wreaks havoc on schedules and leaves employees stranded. Companies are no longer just responsible for working out if employees are safe and getting them out of danger – they’re increasingly expected to help those employees avoid disruptions, whether from the tax office or typhoons, well before they strike.

Data for, and on, the road

I don’t believe there is any way to achieve this sort of corporate clairvoyance without real-time data – about everything from employee locations to weather patterns to the historic on-time arrival rates of specific airlines, on specific routes. The more comprehensive and timely the data, the more accurately companies and employees can identify potential disruptions to their travel experience and work around them. And the more available that data is, the quicker both parties can respond if some unforeseen event does arise and rapid action needs to be taken.

First, companies need software that can interpret their data automatically. In the case of tax liability, for example, employees struggle because of complex and often opaque rules that govern their situation: Singapore’s rules for frequent business travellers, with their many exceptions and caveats, are an excellent example. The right analytics software, however, should be able to absorb and apply those rules, no matter how complex, to any employee’s trip data. Automated analysis of how prone a route is to weather disruptions may be some way off, but we already have tools that can identify potential risks based on an employee’s travel plans. But consider what it means to know in advance the likelihood that a plane journey is going to be disrupted, through easily-visible data on its past performance. In business travel, time is generally money – something employees may be rather keen to take into account.

Companies also need a way to centralise that data on the one platform. Doing so allows the business to reveal correlations, risks, and savings opportunities that may remain invisible without combining multiple data sets. It also makes it a lot easier for employees to see what’s going on when they’re in the field! At Concur, we’re striving for what we call “one on mobile”: putting all relevant travel data on a  so that both the employee and the employer can make fast, well-informed decisions with all the data at their fingertips when situations change.

Finally, we need to be mindful of the fact that many corporate travellers like to go outside the system – booking their own flights, extending stays, and so on. This is particularly true of Asian travellers, of whom nearly 70% choose which airlines or hotels they use. There are two ways to maintain visibility of these employees’ data. The first is by centralising their trip management on a single platform, like TripIt, and making it the only way of claiming back expenses: in other words, aiming for the hip pocket. The other is to tell them why keeping their employers updated of their travel plans is so important. Combining the two should yield the best results.

If employees expect to be taken care of when they travel, they need to trust their companies with their data – and companies must, for their part, look after that data with the utmost care. Just like my friend, most employees are more focused on doing their job than the intricacies of travel management. In a world that’s more complex, and arguably riskier than ever before, it’s in our best interests to look after it – and their overarching wellbeing, beyond just physical safety – for them.