International SOS on risk management trends

Tyler Hosford: The risk management aspect from the business side, is if your people are stuck there, people is always number one, two, and three, but just behind that, the business does still have to continue.

Justin Schuster: Hello, and welcome to The Travel Is a Human Emotion Podcast. Today my guests are Myles Druckman and Tyler Hosford. Both are senior experts on risk management and duty of care from International SOS. Myles, can you take a moment to describe your role at International SOS and then hand off to Tyler to do the same?

Myles Druckman: Thank you, Justin, and thank you for having us here today. So I’m Dr. Myles Druckman. I’m one of our global medical directors at International SOS. And I wear a couple different hats. I look after our global clients’ health care programs particularly on the West Coast, so doing a lot of work with the tech industry, but other industries as well and support, the U.S.-based clients on their global health programs. And then I also help the organization at the corporate level on some of our health innovation work that we do developing new technologies, different partnerships and how we can deliver a more customized and better solution for your travelers, Tyler.

Tyler Hosford: I wear one similar hat with Myles and I want to be very clear that I’m the security counterpart for supporting our clients in the West region. I don’t necessarily work on security innovation but I do get a chance to be involved with a lot of the discussions we have around, how we are approaching the way that world events are impacting travelers from a safety and security perspective.

Justin Schuster: I’m very lucky to have both of you here. And I wanted to kick off our conversation just with an observation that, um, International SOS puts together this fantastic risk outlook report every single year. I highly recommend that people read it. And in the most recent report, and I think the new one is coming out pretty soon here.

Looking at 2024 there was this great stat that said 74 percent of risk management experts believe that geopolitical tensions would significantly impact their organization in 2024. And I was wondering if you are seeing this in truth and how you’re working with customers to address that.

There’s a lot of challenges, obviously in the Middle East and Ukraine and other parts of the world. 

Tyler Hosford: Absolutely. And I think my first question is who are the 26 percent that don’t think geopolitical tensions are going to impact their business? But really as we’ve seen the year of 2024 unfold there’s been no shortage of incidents around the world.

Whether it’s the macro ones we look at the Israel, Gaza that evolved into Israel, Lebanon drawing in Iran. We’ve looked at issues in the Asia Pacific region, the U.S. elections that just concluded. And really these do impact from two perspectives. One, there’s the direct impact on business travelers and the traveling public.

What do these mean in terms of the ability for people to move around and do things? The second impact is really what does this mean on the impact to the individual whether we call that mental health, resilience, mental stability, those types of things these events start to have an impact, whether it’s someone who is scrolling through social media and seeing videos of a crisis situation or, There’s a key hot button issue that they’re very passionate about that politicians are speaking about what that means, if that is occupying their mental bandwidth as opposed to the business trip that they’re supposed to be on the work that they’re supposed to be doing.

So no question that we see that. I think we talk to people and I can talk about it from a security perspective. And then Myles, I think from the way that we’re doing it medically, security, it’s really talking about how do you empower people to be that best traveling version of themselves, understanding, knowing where you’re going, what are the tools available for you?

Look, travel is a great thing, but there are risks. And so how do you think about what’s going on in a location that you’re going to, what are some of those incidents that you might need to be aware of? And then while somebody is on that trip, if things do start to go awry, What are the things that are there to support them?

Myles Druckman: Yeah, I think those are all great points. And it does segue into the mental health side of things for sure. I think all of us have gone through, pandemic with COVID, we’re coming out of that now we have all these world tensions. So this all weighs on us and affects our physicality, it depends on our decision making sometimes, our energy levels, our focus and also, and when you are traveling You need those faculties, right?

Because you’re going into a different environment. It’s not your regular routine. It’s something that is very different. And I think the other thing that happens is that, it does affect your health and your immune system sometimes, so you’re more likely to get the, you may not get COVID, but you get the flu or you get the, get a cold and get run down and particularly if you’re traveling.

That has implications because you may not know where to go and how to get care. It’s still more likely that you’re probably going to get sick on a trip than in, involved in a terrorist attack, even though everyone’s concerned that the terrorist attack is going to happen all the time. It actually doesn’t.

It’s more likely that you might twist your ankle or as they say get the flu. And so that can be a very significant event. for people. And the challenge is how do you actually get care, the right care, at the right time efficiently and hopefully don’t miss the whole purpose of your trip, which was to do the work you needed to get done.

So understanding what your resources are, I think for travelers is really important. So becoming a more savvy, knowledgeable traveler. Aware of their surroundings aware of the risks but also preparing for things that might happen and that’s I think the key thing when you look at the travelers and the organizations that have been doing this for a long time is that they have, they know where to go, they know the resources, they can get to them quickly and they can limit a lot of unnecessary aggravation, pain and frustration and even ongoing and future health issues too.

Justin Schuster: At Spotnana, we recently had our global offsite. We hosted it in Dubai. We did have some concerns about the tensions in the Middle East going into that event. And just as you say, that fortunately didn’t emerge as an issue, but somebody did more or less twist their ankle and get injured.

You brought up mental health, and one of the other great insights in the study is this data point that said 80 percent of risk management experts believe that stress and burnout would have a significant impact on their business and their employees. And I was fortunate enough to attend an International SOS event that you both spoke at recently. And one of the things that really stood out for me was this sort of point where risk managers were saying maybe a few years ago before the pandemic, their role was a little bit more behind the scenes. And that got thrust into the spotlight due to all the communications around masking and office protection, and now they’re getting a higher volume of requests from the organization about lots of things. And there’s a lot more that they’re dealing with on a day-to-day basis. So how are you advising companies and risk managers to think about duty of care for themselves as well as for their employees?

Myles Druckman: No, it’s a great point and I think we started with looking at the world holistically and all the threats that are out there that impact your sense of well being. You’re on this whole uncertainty in the world that weighs on individuals. So organizations really can’t control what’s happening in Lebanon.

They can’t control what’s happening with the elections for a large part or in other stressors, world stressors. But one thing that organizations can control is the work environment. So I think what we’re seeing is a lot of companies refocus on what are the processes that they have in place that might be causing undue stress, whether that’s how you have to organize your trip, can we make that more seamless for you to take the stress off of you?

Educating you before you go, so you’re not surfing around the web, maybe getting the wrong information and getting scared about a situation that you don’t need to be scared about. So reducing workplace stress, I think is something that we’ve been focusing a lot of energy on, and I think a lot of organizations see this as, in a sense, low hanging fruit that they could focus on that might bring the temperature down in the workplace.

This is also linked to the drive, particularly in the U.S., around workplace violence. They want to really minimize that and bring it to zero, of course. And if there’s certain things in the workplace that can be reduced, that’s a big issue. A part of this is process. Making processes more efficient.

Less work that the employee has to do and making life a bit more easy, work related. But the other factor too, in that same report, they said that 69 percent of employees thought that their boss had the same mental health impact as their spouse or partner. So if you’ve got a great boss, that’s great.

If you don’t, it could be an issue. And most bosses don’t think they’re bad bosses. So the challenge is how do you train managers to limit unnecessary stress. Have you checked to see whether your employees have had a holiday in the last six months, right? Are you giving appropriate deadlines for people, right?

Are you, the way you communicate, is that causing undue stress? So these are the things that companies can control, whereas the world events, they can’t. So they’re figuring, okay let’s try to focus on that workplace. So we see that as a big driver. And that leads into travel as well because all the more efficient you can be in the way you manage travel, you’ve got the car ready to pick them up.

It’s all secure. You’ve got the hotel organized, everything goes smoothly. It’s a lot and all of us have been there. It’s a much easier and less stressful process, right? Even if you lose your luggage, you know who to go to. It’s not, you’re in an unknown environment. How can you get that support?

It definitely takes the pressure down. And I think that’s really becoming more and more of an important factor. It used to be nice to have. Now it’s pretty much, you must have

Justin Schuster: Tyler. Any thoughts on your side? 

Tyler Hosford: Yeah, I think just like Myles was saying, really having all those things in place so that how do you allow people to focus on what’s important? Any of the variables that you can, you’re not going to eliminate the variables, right? But you want to try and make them be a little bit less variable so that if people know what to do, they know, they then know what’s in place that really helps them be able to go out and use that bandwidth to just focus on what they have to do.

Justin Schuster: Makes sense and gives me pause to reflect on how I can, as a leader at Spotnana, help my team to navigate the stresses in the world, at least by contributing in my part to make the workplace less stressful. One of the things that or one other great topic that was covered in the risk report was the idea of sustainability and the effects of climate change.

The data point was that 72 percent of respondents believe that extreme weather events would have a significant impact on their business or people in 2024 and we’re definitely seeing lots of impacts in the U.S. related to weather. What are some of the things that international SOS is doing to advise clients around risk in this area?

Tyler Hosford: Yeah, no question that you look at what happened with the hurricanes in the Southeastern U.S. where you had parts of North Carolina and Tennessee where hurricanes were, at worst you got some bad rain for a little bit, but you’ve seen devastation there on levels that. I’ve never been seen before.

And so again, it may not necessarily be business travelers going there, but if someone who lives there has to go on a trip, they all of a sudden can’t do that. And so we’re talking a lot about how do you help know where your people are? In the era of work from anywhere, work remotely, one example I think was last year.

We had a company who’s primarily based in California. None of their people live in the Eastern U.S. and around hurricane season, a hurricane came through and they said, ‘Oh yeah, we’re okay.’ Come to find out one of their people was working in one of the beach towns in North Carolina, hadn’t told anyone, and all of a sudden he was stuck there for a couple of days and couldn’t make a meeting.

And understanding where your people are. Because again there’s two aspects to it. And Justin, we were talking earlier about risk management and the duty of care, and this is where that comes into play. There’s a duty of care. How do you make sure that you’re preparing your people?

How are you helping them be safe? How are you responding in terms of after something happens? Are you giving, are you helping them get access to food, water, medicine? The risk management aspect from the business side is if your people are stuck there. People is always number one, two, and three, but just behind that, the business does still have to continue.

How are you mitigating those risks? And so people are thinking about their business continuity plans. They’re looking at what we have to do? What is the rollover? Is it something as simple as we flip a switch and operations roll to a different office? Or is it something where we have to have something much more robust in place.

So thinking about it from those two perspectives that they’re separate, they very much run in parallel, but have very different considerations. 

Myles Druckman: Yeah. And I think the climate issue has a very personal side as well. And so I think we, when we’ve looked at these, major events that are happening, obviously they’re very much in the news.

They’re very front and center. But I think the other health area is around air quality. and around temperature. So air quality, the more and more research coming out, it has a significant impact on health. And air quality is not always just industrial pollution, although it is very significant in certain cities at certain times of the year.

But it’s also related to wildfires and smoke that comes through from that perspective. And so having individuals, particularly travelers, going to places that they didn’t realize the air quality is that bad in the city in China, for example. My gosh, and I’ve got asthma. And suddenly, I’m having an asthma attack.

That’s pretty significant. Understanding your personal situation. What is the air quality in that area? What’s going to be their quality in the area when you’re there? And then temperature from an occupational health perspective is becoming a very, really hot topic. No pun intended. Because you’re going to see the ability to work outside, to be outside at certain temperatures, and it’s not just the temperature, there’s a concept called wet bulb temperature, which is a combination of temperature and humidity.

And so this is a common indicator for when people that work outside are allowed to work and how often, how long they can work for. This is heavy industry construction. They’ve been doing this for years, but now you’re seeing other groups have to look at this and it’s also coming into the workplace to inside their buildings.

It’s not always outside. Server rooms can now be up at extreme temperatures. And so now people work inside environments at high temperatures. So these are all areas that are relatively new frontiers for certain industries that never had to worry about temperature before, that are now having to focus on it.

Looking at all of the occupational exposures that are coming out of climate change, whether there’s more mosquitoes in the neighborhood now. So suddenly, wow, we actually have to worry about mosquitoes and West Nile virus and all the rest of it that we’ve haven’t had to look at, worry about before.

So I think it makes it all sound scarier. But I think if you’re prepared you know how to deal with mosquitoes at night, you may need a mask if you’re going outside and the air pollution is bad. So there’s mitigating factors. But we just have to, there’s things that we’ve never had to really worry about in the past.

Tyler Hosford: One last comment on that. I was talking with a Chief Security Officer. It was almost a year ago now, and they were looking at a new office location, and he said for the first time, they are considering proximity to a coastline. It’s not the deciding factor. It’s not even one of the top ten factors, but it’s starting to creep in there where business decisions are starting to be made factoring in climate change.

That’s not going to go away. And it may never be number one, but it’s starting to become a very real thing where companies are thinking about it from the perspective of long-term operations. 

Justin Schuster: It’s just fascinating to hear your perspective. And for me, it helps me think about the broader landscape of the challenge that companies face now.

I’d say for me, the first association with climate change is more of these extreme weather events. But you think about the whole. How much more is really impacted in the way that companies have to make decisions about the care of their employees, where they place their offices, how they manage their operations.

It’s quite a large problem for companies to be thinking about. Tyler, I want to get back to something that you brought up, which was this question of how do I know where my employees are at a moment in time so that I can, you be responsible with around duty of care and deliver on what’s required of me as a professional and as a company there, what do you see as the primary data challenges around duty of care?

And what is international SOS doing to address those? 

Tyler Hosford: So I think the quality of data is absolutely one of the first ones in terms of making sure that you have direct feeds into travel systems. And, I’m a security professional. I’m not a travel professional. So I apologize if I get some the terminology wrong there, but making sure that, when you’re booking something that you get the accurate information, think of the number of times when, if somebody has an apostrophe or a space in their last name, or I include my middle initial or not making sure that all of that gets captured so that you’re able to know who is where because if, anyone who’s ever used Excel at the simplest form knows that.

If one small thing is wrong and you’re doing a simple lookup formula, it’s going to miss that data point. And so ensuring that using that, because using someone’s itinerary and their booking information, that’s the easiest way. And I say easiest because that’s also the best way to be compliant with data privacy regulations and tracking things.

If you think about how nobody wants something on their phone, that is a GPS tracker. They say, I don’t want my company to track me on my business trip. That’s fine. But by having that itinerary with where they are going, what was the flight they booked? What’s the hotel they booked? What’s the car they booked?

And then as long as they’re following the procedures, if they make changes, they make it in the system that then gets reflected. The challenge is when someone says I have a business trip and I have to fly to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and I’m having to book on Miat, which doesn’t happen to show up in my particular travel system.

So I’m just going to book it externally. If they don’t log that properly, or they forget to log out of it, they didn’t even think to log that. Then that gets missed. So things like that, where people are booking outside, another big kind of repeat offender there is when we look at executive travel and oftentimes executives might be booked charter or private for safety and security reasons.

They might have particular preferences that don’t show up on the regular travel system. So they just book separately. And so making sure that. People are that, that is being captured somewhere. And so really having that fidelity of the data becomes so important because when you don’t have that, when we push out alerts, we push that out based on a number of different factors.

We do have an app and that app, when you have it downloaded and there is an alert, the alert will query any app that is in that location for all the data privacy people are listening. We are very careful and that location is not stored. It’s a one time query that gets sent out. That’s one way. But another way is based on itineraries and those types of things.

And so if you’ve gone off script for that type of thing, then it’s very easy to have those be missed. The other aspect to this, and I touched on it with remote work and remote travel, when you have people that are working remotely or with the advent of leisure and the way that people say, Oh, my company’s paying for me to go to Madrid for four days.

I’m going to tack on three more days and go to Lisbon as well. If you’re then in Lisbon, if something happens there, that may not be on your work itinerary and it gets through a gray area. What is the duty of care for a company for a travel that has taken personal days while on a work trip that is bookended by work flights?

But the reality is, if you think that knowledge is power and you want to be able to know where your people are during an incident, ensuring that people understand that these tools are there and the importance of making sure that your trip is captured because it becomes a safety and security. We can’t help you.

We can’t come support you if we don’t know where you are. 

Myles Druckman: Yeah. I think that we’ve talked about duty of care, which basically is the responsibility of the organization to support their people. But there’s a corollary to that, which is duty of loyalty. So this is where your employees responsibility to your organization to actually follow the procedures and to inform the company so that actually they can be supported.

You can have the greatest policies in the world, the greatest systems in the world, but if your travelers don’t follow them, then you’re stuck. And I think the second piece is that, There are situations and we have quite numerous situations depending on your industry and your company where employees want to be tracked, right?

So if you are in the media industry and everyone’s leaving a war zone but you’re flying in you want your people to know where you are and to really make sure that, okay, we’re going from point A to point B, and it’s going to take us three hours, and we’re going to, we want you to check in every hour so we know that you’re okay.

So that functionality is very valuable in certain circumstances, which is an opt-in situation. But again very situationally specific, right? So I think you want to have the capability of being able to do that as well as because that’s a key feature depending on the type of work you’re doing and the risk that you’re involved in.

Justin Schuster: Spotnana has an integration with International SOS, and we’ve helped to address some of those challenges around providing a holistic data picture where at least for all the complexity that’s introduced around NDC we’re able to provide International SOS with a high-quality data feed. 

And we’re also providing that linkage between the booking and the overall trip. To make that picture more clear so that’s not something that has to be interpolated. What you’re bringing to the foreground, Tyler and Miles is that it’s to get the whole picture. You also have to be really looking at those offline bookings.

And today we would partner with somebody else to help complete that picture. And a TMC would assemble that, that whole solution for a customer and offline bookings can be added manually to Spotnana, but the automation around that would happen through a third party. 

Myles Druckman: Yeah, and I think the future of the future traveler is going to be one where the individual has a comprehensive kind of travel profile which is more of the static baseline of kind of your situation, what is your vaccination status, where have you traveled before, your travel history any kind of any disabilities, any accommodations that you need all of these types of things.

None of us is getting younger. We’re all getting older. We’re gonna need more and more support potentially when we get into certain situations. And so having that advanced knowledge of that personal profile will help us also make a better plan for that individual’s trip.

That customization is the future of where SOS wants to go when it comes to personalizing to your needs so that you can get the best when you’re traveling. 

Justin Schuster: Personalization is definitely a huge theme. And when people talk about the future of travel and having richer data profiles and being able to tap into AI to automate decisions around that, what do you think of as some of the primary opportunities around the future of duty of care?

And does AI play a big role in that? As you think about it. 

Myles Druckman: Yeah, AI is the sexy word right now. And it’s a very amorphous kind of thing. And it can do a lot of different things. But I think where when it comes to travel basically being able to assess data.

And using predictive intelligence so that you can see what are the most likely issues that are gonna come up and try to mitigate those. So I think that kind of automation will be helpful for personalizing the service for you based on your needs, based on your interests, you’re going to get targeted information that’s the most useful for you as a traveler.

All of those types of things I think are going to be important. I still think that we don’t want to get away from the personal touch, which is very important. The last thing I think most people want is a voice on the end of the line in the middle of a crisis that’s not human.

I don’t think we’re there yet. I don’t think that’s what people want. I think the human touch is still going to be very important, particularly in these kinds of urgent, emergent situations. But how we get information, digest it, how we look at future threats and how we automate processes so it’s more efficient and hopefully more cost effective too.

So I think things that used to take a lot of time and effort and cost, those things are going to come down. So hopefully the travel experience will be a much more personalized cost, more cost effective. But I say the human touch remains, a critical piece. 

Tyler Hosford: Yeah, when I look at it, I always look at the difference between AI versus automation and automation allows people to be more efficient. So if I’m the person responsible for that human touch, I can automate certain things that I can then go do. AI, it’s getting there. When we look at it, I often say it’s artificial information because the intelligence isn’t quite there yet.

It’s definitely getting there. And I think there will be things that it’s able to do. But again, to Myles’ point, that human interaction, you just, you look at the prevalence of travel agents for leisure travel. They’re having a bit of a resurgence where people have realized, yes, I can go do this on my own, but to have an individual that can help guide and help shape the trip that I’m going to have.

And when you think about it from whether it’s, duty of care, risk management, a lot of these things, information is so powerful and AI can really help surface trends and say, look, we’re seeing this, but you still need a human to give that final verification. And it’s so powerful and it’s just making sure that there’s the appropriate guardrails on that and people don’t understand that.

I think that’s one of the big challenges, at least in the security space, is people that say I’m a security professional. I’m not a tech professional. It’s well, you don’t need to be both, but you need to be tech savvy. You need to be AI-savvy and understand, how can this be used? What are the limitations?

Because it’s not going away. It’s just going to get more efficient. But there are still some concurrent roles for the human element versus what AI can do.

Justin Schuster: This is definitely going to be a big tension for the travel industry to investigate and resolve over the next few years, where does AI come in and provide automation that I want as a traveler?

And how do I preserve that human touch at the same time? And what’s the right balance to strike for companies and for individual travelers. Thank you so much for joining us today. I want to close with one question, since this is The Travel Is a Human Emotion Podcast, and we were just touching on this.

What do you see as the connection between travel and human emotions through the lens of your roles? 

Tyler Hosford: I’ll kick it off. Travel is one of the coolest things in the world. Whenever I talk to people in security, I have to doom and gloom a little bit, but I always close saying, think back to the first business trip that you ever went on, where you say you’re at 20, 22, 23, right out of college. You say, wait, hold on. Somebody is going to pay for me to go somewhere. They’re going to pay for my hotel, my meals, my car. What’s the catch? It’s, oh you have to go actually do work.

That’s great. Nobody. I won’t say nobody has bad times. Nobody typically books a trip when they’re say, oh I’m really sad. And so I’m gonna book a sad trip. Usually I’m gonna book a trip to make it happy. I’m feeling great. So I’m gonna go do that.

So travel is a great thing. And I would argue that despite the scariness of the world, I would argue that we actually live in the safest time to travel in human history in part because we have a lot of these tools out there to make travel safer. If I’m traveling 300 years ago, I’m going somewhere where there may be no one to tell me what to expect.

Now I can get a briefing. I can make sure I have my medicine. I know what to expect. And I have people to call if something goes wrong. You know that when we think about that human emotion, it’s one of the things I get to travel. It’s exciting. It’s awesome. And I’m so glad that we’re back to it post COVID because COVID that was a big thing.

We’re all cooped up. Getting to be able to go out and do that again is such a great thing. 

Myles Druckman: I completely agree. I think that you have this dichotomy of excitement. And then uncertainty, right? And I think the more that you can allay some of those uncertainties or understand that look it will be uncertain and I think one of the messages that we’re we’ve learned through the pandemic Hopefully we’ve learned is that you know in any situation there’s always going to be uncertainty and you can never you know have a hundred percent answer and you have to be comfortable with that uncertainty.

As a society we need to learn to live with uncertainty better. We have a younger workforce that’s coming on board every day. They have different interests and different experiences and different comfort levels. I think, the different types of traveler, you’re actually having to personalize for them as well.

Their emotional experience is going to be very different. So a savvy traveler who has been doing it for 25 years is probably not as excited to travel but knows what to do. Whereas the young traveler is just ready to go and have all kinds of great experiences and you might need to tamp them down.

So I think you need, as I say, that’s where I think personalization comes in and also personal mental resilience as well. Some people are just more resilient than others, and hopefully people get to learn and understand what their resiliency levels are and what they’re most comfortable with.

And it’s always good to get outside your comfort zone, on a business trip, it’s probably not the best thing to do. So I think it’s balancing those things of the type of traveler and their status. And also the relevant situation that they’re going to be going into and how you want to manage that.

Justin Schuster: Thank you so much, both of you for sharing your time and your insights with us.