First published in the March issue of Nonprofit Business Advisor, available electronically to current subscribers in January.
Imagine that a nonprofit or international nongovernmental organization (NGO) sends an employee or volunteer and his entire family—a young couple with young children—to a remote country bereft of infrastructure, political stability, and standardized medical facilities to dig wells and/or provide latrines for the country’s rural citizens. While in-country, one of the children contracts diphtheria and becomes dehydrated. Adequate medical care may be hundreds of miles away, the roads may be treacherous and the local doctor may not speak the volunteer’s language, or have sanitary medical supplies and equipment. A call comes into the nonprofit or NGO’s home office detailing the volunteer’s predicament.
The health and well-being of that child and family now rest on the attention the organization gave to its duty of care.
“Roughly 25 percent of executive level management that I have called are unaware that they have people in-country,” said Suzanne Garber, COO at International SOS, who described the scenario above. “Whether it’s in a university, NGO, or a corporate environment, knowing beforehand can prepare the organization and the individuals traveling, so that help can get to them in a timely manner when something happens.”
International SOS partners with NGOs throughout the world to safeguard the health, safety, and well-being of their affiliates and associates worldwide, the COO said. These NGOs are in very remote places, so it is imperative that organizations prepare or bring in a consultant like International SOS, in order to do the proper analysis and risk mitigation to help prevent accidents or other injuries, she said.
Garber likens preparation efforts to a puzzle with many pieces.
“Many different partners in an NGO community—senior management, project managers, PR managers, medical directors, and travel directors—all of these people have a place at the table, and the communication in and amongst these teams is absolutely critical when identifying risks and rolling out a plan to mitigate those risks, as well as responding when disaster does strike,” said Garber.
In 2008–2009, International SOS commissioned Dr. Lisbeth Claus, a world-renowned, foremost expert on duty of care, to perform research that led to the first-ever study on duty of care, Garber said. That white paper—which put duty of care on the map—led to the recent release of a ground-breaking benchmarking report “Duty of Care and Travel Risk Management Global Benchmarking Study.”
“I have always been doing duty of care as an academic and my specialty is the employee crossing borders and the role of human resources,” said Dr. Claus, Ph.D., and professor of Global Human Resources at Willamette University’s Atkinson Graduate School of Management. “The role of human resources to the duty of care is to protect the health, safety, and security of that employee—not only as a human aspect but as a legal and moral responsibility,” she said.
According to Dr. Claus, the study focused on how companies accomplished their duty of care responsibilities and who was responsible.
“These NGOs were sending employees to very remote locations, often to conflict zones and very high risk countries that have been labeled as the ‘Bottom 60 countries,’” said Dr. Claus, “meaning countries with very poor infrastructure, health care, roads, and rule of law—truly some of the very most dangerous locations in the world.”
NGOs often used to take a more “go native,” approach, she said, meaning they had a tendency to rely on the local population, but more recently this method declined as employees increasingly confronted political unrest and higher crime, leaving them vulnerable and unprotected.
Yet for all of the mistakes NGOs have made along the way, they’ve made tremendous strides where their corporate cousins have until recently feared to tread, said Dr. Claus.
“The corporate world can learn a lot from NGOs, because they are the first ones operating in-country, and they are using fewer resources,” Dr. Claus said. “We can learn their lessons; NGOs work in very difficult environments, conflict, remote, high-risk environmental areas, and they can be a little more aggressive in partnering with corporations and governments to share what they know.”
Garber agreed. “A nonprofit may ask itself ‘Why should I care about duty of care?’ It comes down to the issue of people. Each NGO has its particular mission—whether that’s to assist women and children in developing countries … or assist children in the United States. That mission is impossible to achieve without people, so beyond the moral, financial, and legal obligations of duty of care, people are the most important asset, and without them nothing could be accomplished. Employees know when an organization is concerned about their health, well-being and safety, and then there is no limit to what they can do—it will be reciprocated,” she said.
For more information
International SOS provides integrated medical, clinical, and security services to organizations with international operations. To learn more, email inquiries@internationalsos.com. Dr. Lisbeth Claus is professor of Global Human Resources at Willamette University and author of “Duty of Care and Travel Risk Management Global Benchmarking Study.” To contact Dr. Claus, email lclaus@willamette.edu.
The five stakeholders
In the first-of-its-kind report, “Duty of Care and Travel Risk Management Global Benchmarking Study,” Dr. Lisbeth Claus, professor of Global Human Resources at Willamette University, asked survey respondents:
- Who are your current five duty of care stakeholders? According to the study participants—in no particular order—the five stakeholders are: senior management, risk management, travel management, human resources, and security. The order varies, Dr. Claus said, depending on the organization’s coordination procedures and who holds prime responsibility.
- Who should be the five duty of care stakeholders at your organization? “Everyone answered ‘Everyone,’ so who is it?” Dr. Claus said. “We found it usually falls on human resources and senior management, who has the lowest awareness of duty of care. That is an issue,” she said. Oftentimes, it depends on who has experience, who is willing to go the extra mile, and who is already aware of the importance of duty of care, the professor said.
To read the benchmark study, visit www.internationalsos.com/en/files/Duty_of_Care_2011_Executive_Summary.pdf.
Improve your organization’s duty of care responsibilities
Professor of Global Human Resources at Willamette University, Dr. Lisbeth Claus said that there are three areas where nonprofits or NGOs should improve their duty of care activities:
- Improve awareness of duty of care. NGO senior management often does not have the awareness of corporate management, the professor said. Their awareness is quite low, and when considering the resources necessary to successfully implement duty of care, it becomes critical to increase awareness level.
- Improve risk assessments. Dr. Claus said many NGOs are doing a poor job of assessing risk prior to employees’ departure and this is key to protecting an employee.
- Improve employee education and training. NGOs tend to be much less effective in educating and training their employees before they leave, because they do so little, if any, risk assessment, especially in the areas of illness or other health concerns.
To learn more about Dr. Lisbeth Claus, duty of care, or to read the benchmark study, visit http://dialogueson
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