Employee Safety: Travel Guides

You are responsible for traveling employees' safety. It's good to tell them what not to do. It's better to teach them how to be alert and anticipate and avoid trouble.

Early on in this session, I ask Mike Belcher if a course such as this is worthwhile for someone who has spearheaded travel safety at a large multinational company for the last five years. He says he is picking up some tips, and he emphasizes one of today's core take-aways: It never hurts to get a refresher on this subject. Lesson No. 1: Blend into the Scenery and Stay Alert The class gets going with a vivid reminder that security for business people abroad begins with personal vigilance. To emphasize this point, Katz presents the group with a real-life, worst-case scenario: a slide that pictures four Union Texas Petroleum employees who were ambushed and killed by Islamic militants in Karachi, Pakistan, on Nov. 12, 1997.

"These men were not captains of industry," Katz says of the victims, who were auditors for the company. "They were four guys who went to work."

Katz explains that it's typically midlevel executives who get sent to places like this, and he emphasizes that CSOs need to teach travel safety to everyone who travels, not solely to the higher-ups.

The victims in the Union Texas Petroleum case broke several rules by falling into routine patterns of behavior easily discernible by outsiders. These men had one route to work from their hotel. And they took that route every day. Always at 8 a.m. Always getting into the same minivan. Always together.

On the day they were killed, Katz says, they were followed by four men with AK-47s who trailed their minivan in a red Honda Civic.

"We can learn a lot from their mistakes," says Katz. First, he suggests teaching employees to maintain a state of "relaxed alertness," which he defines as being aware of your surroundings and taking note of what is out of place. The best way to avoid being the victim of an attack, he says, is to avoid vulnerable situations. Vary your route. Leave each day at a different time. And if you note the same red Civic with the bent antenna and the cracked windshield parked outside your hotel more than three days in a row, assume you're being watched.

Katz also instructs the class that it makes sense to try to blend into the garb and culture of the country you're in. If you wouldn't wear your Cartier watch in the lower west side of Manhattan, don't flash it around a village in Bangladesh.Lesson No. 2: Everyone's Safety Is the CSO's JobIt used to be that CSOs worried about the itineraries of the top five executives; now they need to know where everyone is at all times. Not only that, employees approach CSOs more often now, concerned about their travel safety. "A couple of years ago, [employees] didn't want to hear it from me when I'd brief them about security issues before they traveled. Now they're paging me to ask for an armored car when they go to Colombia," Belcher says.