Follow our step-by-step guide to ensuring that you are doing right by your employees in terms of their health, welfare and safety. Gillian Upton has the lowdown

IT’S ON the tip of everyone’s tongue; the Corporate Manslaughter & Homicide Bill. Due on to the statute books on April 6 2008, it is concentrating the minds of every employer, whether they have travelling employees or not. Its jurisdiction is England and Wales but many observers believe it will force employers to watch carefully which hotels they place their staff in around the world, how safe the airline is they fly on and even to check how safe the destination is they travel to.

The law reforms the existing corporate manslaughter law, placing blame squarely on management failure with a new, specific offence of corporate manslaughter. The twin tragedies of 9/11 in New York and 7/7 in London have already concentrated the minds of most corporates, who are now utilising traveller tracker systems, pushing for greater policy compliance, even mandating policies, organising crisis management plans and daily inputs from global security sources.

One company on top of all the legislative changes is Japanese financial institution Nomura International. “We decided to be a leader vis a vis the Corporate Manslaughter legislation and have been monitoring the Act prior to it becoming legislation for 18 months and we are confident that we are now compliant,” explains the company’s Corporate Security Manager Mark Hanna.

Hanna sits in the London office of the company, which is the European HQ of the business. Appointed three years ago, Hanna works seamlessly within the travel department to provide security inputs to all travellers, emergency contacts and people tracking systems for Nomura’s travellers, as manual feeds into the travel management programme. It is managed by a TMC, which is HRG. This manual system already encompassed checking the safety record of airlines and even drilled down to checking local customs.

Explains HRG’s Stewart Harvey: ”We’re at the crossroads of who’s intending to travel, what advice should they be given, in terms of health, security, medical etc, and programme our systems with their policy and guidelines and link to any third party companies Nomura is getting source information from.” Read on for Hanna’s step-by-step guide on how Nomura got ahead of the game and satisfied the needs of the new legislation.

STEP 1: Have a clear objective. Nomura wanted to “top up on what we were already doing towards the safety of our staff,” explains Hanna, and to replace the manual feeds with an automated system. “It was part of a strategy to make sure it was a joined-up communication to the traveller,” he explained.

STEP 2: Check out your responsibilities. Find out what the legal requirements are then compare those with what you already have in place. “Then speak to a specialist,” advises Hanna. “If you talk to the right people it’s easy.” See our panel (right) on what the law stipulates and the address of the Ministry of Justice website where you can download a leaflet containing further information.

STEP 3: Resource the project. “It’s not a big a project as you think,” says Nomura’s Hanna. “We did it with a small working group, from various departments such as travel, legal, security and procurement” explains Hanna.

STEP 4: Research the marketplace. Check out what’s out there and what suits your company. Nomura settled on The Anvil Group’s Employee Travel Monitoring System (ETMS). The Anvil product is helping Nomura fulfil its duty of care to all employees. The system reports pre- and mid-traveller activity and can archive travel records too. It also flags up dodgy airlines, if there are too many employees travelling together on a single flight, high-risk destinations and countries and whether you have any travellers in that high-risk destination. “We monitor thousands of different sources for ETMS,” explains The Anvil Group’s Managing Director Matthew Judge.

STEP 5: Ensure all suppliers can work seamlessly together. “We do the who, where and when,” says HRG’s Stewart, “so we track the traveller before and during the trip, and Anvil’s security advice piece has the global IT security, corporate security and location-specific security advice.”

STEP 6: Organise a dry run. Nomura is undertaking rigorous trials before going live on January 1. It’s in trial and test now, building up division by division, with user groups of frequent travellers and travel managers, the former picked for their last-minute bookings two or three days in advance and for changing their travel plans and juggling several trips at once. “So far the system is spot on,” says Hanna. “And we have a lot of time to get it right before April 6. We do not want to rush into anything.”

STEP 7: Update the travel policy. This may mean changing suppliers if some hotels, locations or airlines are considered unsafe. You may need to spell out how many executives can travel together on the same flight and specify board sign-off for travel to high risk destinations, as Nomura already does. Nomura’s policy is mandated, which is another safeguard for your travellers. The company only needed to make procedural changes to its policy as much of this was already in place. “We were already comfortable with our locations and hotels,” says Hanna. The policy may need to be re-issued if there have been significant changes, and travellers should be asked to sign a copy. Nomura advised all employees of the changes and the company’s travel policy is an integral part of the company training which includes a sign-off at the end.

STEP 8: Sell it to the business. Nomura began from a strong standing point as senior buy-in was already there. Nonetheless, says Hanna, “Few people embrace change so we had to do it in the correct way and educate travellers. We explained how it would benefit them and how our company would be perceived outside the business as a caring and compliant company.”

STEP 9: Train staff. Nomura’s training was voluntary; now it’s mandatory. A new phase of training will commence at Nomura from January 1, once the company is satisfied that the new system is working.

STEP 10: Don’t get complacent. “We’ll be continuously monitoring the process,” says Hanna. “Compliance is all about actively managing the process. If we fail to manage it then we fail the employees’ duty of care. We’ll audit, as we see fit and do test texts on the spot too.”

He adds: “We are very confident that we are doing everything under our power to ensure employee safety.”

A GUIDE TO THE NEW LEGISLATION
IT’S important to point out that the Corporate Manslaughter & Homicide Bill does not make any new demands on business. What it does do is shift responsibility for any failings. It focuses on changing the way in which an offence of manslaughter applies to corporations.

A business can be prosecuted if a gross failing by its senior managers to take reasonable care for the safety of their workers or members of the public caused a person’s death.

What will then be under the spotlight is how a business conducts itself and whether that is in a responsible manner. A company must be able to demonstrate that it’s doing the best it can and to demonstrate duty of care for all employees.

The current law requires a very senior individual to be found personally guilty of gross negligence manslaughter before the company itself can be convicted. The new law, however, changes all that, and will be able to attribute to an organisation failures in the way its activities are organised or managed at a senior level as a gross breach of a duty of care the organisation owed employees as (1) their employer or the occupier of the building, or (2) in supplying goods or services or performing a commercial activity.

The penalty will be an unlimited fine and a court order would order the business to publicise its failings and also show what it was doing to ensure it wouldn’t happen again. These fines could bankrupt a small company so the new law is not to be taken lightly.

The law applies in England and Wales and is effective from April 6 2008. There is some ambiguity in the law and only specific case law will give businesses a better steer. In the first instance, companies should ensure that they have adequate health and safety management arrangements in place.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

Visit www.justice.gov.uk, for a download-able PDF on the Corporate Manslaughter & Homicide Bill. Members of the Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development can check out its website, www.cipd.co.uk

WHAT IT MEANS IF YOU GET IT WRONG
ADVISES Matthew Judge, Managing Director of The Anvil Group: “Mandating policy is essential. If, for example, one of your travellers books into a B&B themselves, outside policy, and that accommodation has no CCTV, no sprinkler system in case of fire, no evacuation procedure, no 24-hour security and there is a fire, the employer will be liable.

“This law will question what companies did to make sure that the accommodation booked was up to scratch. You will have to demonstrate that you have performed a risk assessment at that hotel,” says Judge.

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