Employer's Duty of Care: Legal Requirements and Best Practices

Employer's duty of care is the legal obligation to protect employees from foreseeable harm while they're working, including when they travel for business.

OSHA's General Duty Clause requires employers to keep workplaces free of serious recognized hazards, and courts have extended "workplace" to include any location where employees perform their jobs, whether it’s hotels, airports, client sites, and destinations abroad.

Organizations aren't expected to eliminate every possible risk, but they must take sensible precautions against threats they could reasonably anticipate.

In practice, this obligation spans the entire trip.

• Before travel: employers must assess destination risks, brief travelers on safety precautions, and confirm emergency contacts are in place.
• During travel: organizations need visibility into traveler locations and the ability to respond when disruptions occur.
• After travel: incidents should be reviewed to identify patterns and improve future response.

Many organizations formalize these obligations using ISO 31030:2021, the international standard for travel risk management.

Why Does Duty of Care Matter?

Duty of care directly affects whether employees are willing to travel and whether the company can protect them when something goes wrong.

Legal Exposure

Organizations can face lawsuits and regulatory penalties when employees are harmed during business travel and the company failed to take reasonable precautions. And the reputational damage often outlasts the legal costs.

Employee Trust and Retention

Employees who feel unsafe during business travel may become reluctant travelers or leave for companies that take safety seriously. According to the International SOS Risk Outlook 2024 survey, 64% of organizations report that employee expectations for duty of care have increased.

The Visibility Challenge

One of the greatest challenges to implementing duty of care is knowing where your employees are. When travelers book outside company systems, often to get cheaper rates on consumer sites, HR and travel managers may have a difficult time locating them during emergencies.

Risks Involved in Business Travel

Travel disruptions create immediate operational challenges. Flight cancellations, delays, and missed connections strand employees in unfamiliar locations, and weather events, strikes, or mechanical issues can affect multiple travelers at once.

Without proactive alerts, the company typically learns about these disruptions only when stranded employees call in distress.

Disruptions are stressful but usually resolvable. Health and security emergencies, however, raise the stakes significantly. Travelers face everything from minor illness to serious medical emergencies, with international travel adding complexity around healthcare systems, language barriers, and insurance coverage. Civil unrest, crime, and terrorism compound these challenges in higher-risk areas.

Beyond destination-level risks, personal safety requires individualized consideration. Solo travelers, particularly women and LGBTQ+ employees, may face heightened risks in certain destinations that inclusive duty of care programs must address.

How to Keep Employees Safe When They Travel

Manual duty of care might work when only a few people are on the road, but at scale, these practices require technology that automates monitoring, centralizes traveler data, and enables rapid response. Here's how to build a program that scales:

Create a Formal Travel Risk Management Policy

A written travel risk management policy establishes accountability before incidents occur.

Assign specific roles:

• A risk owner who evaluates destinations and maintains tiering
• An approver for high-risk travel requests
• An emergency coordinator who activates response protocols

The policy should cover pre-trip requirements, traveler responsibilities, escalation procedures, and post-incident review.

Use ISO 31030:2021 as your framework, which is the international standard for travel risk management and helps ensure you haven't missed critical components. Review annually at minimum, and update immediately after mergers and acquisitions, geographic expansion, or major global events.

Conduct Destination Risk Assessments

Before approving travel, assess the destination against current conditions:

• Are there State Department advisories?
• Recent security incidents?
• Disease outbreaks?
• Healthcare limitations that would complicate a medical emergency?

Tier destinations by risk level — low, moderate, high — with escalating requirements for each.

High-risk destinations might require VP approval, mandatory check-ins, or restrictions on solo travel. Review your tiering quarterly and immediately after major events (elections, natural disasters, civil unrest).

Provide Pre-Trip Information and Resources

Before departure, travelers should know the specific risks they'll face. Provide the company's emergency hotline, local embassy contact, and nearest hospital or clinic to their hotel.

Verify their insurance covers medical evacuation if they're traveling to remote areas or countries with limited healthcare infrastructure.

Document that the briefing occurred. For example, a simple email confirmation creates a record for liability protection.

Maintain Real-Time Traveler Visibility

Real-time visibility allows you to see where employees are during travel. For example, Navan's live traveler map consolidates flight tracking, hotel confirmations, and ground transportation in one view, with one-click calling and push notifications to reach any traveler immediately.

Above: Navan's live traveler map shows where employees are traveling in real time.

Support Proactive Disruption Response

Proactive disruption response allows you to learn about potential problems even before your travelers. Navan's Travel Impact Dashboard monitors global events (weather, strikes, security incidents) and shows which of your travelers are potentially affected.

So instead of waiting for stranded employees to call, you can reach out with rebooking options before they're stuck.

Provide 24/7 Support Access

Emergencies don't respect business hours. When a traveler calls at 2 a.m. with a canceled flight or medical emergency, they need a human who already knows their itinerary, booking history, and company policies, not someone asking them to repeat information while stressed.

Navan's 24/7 in-house agents see the complete traveler picture instantly, while our AI assistant Ava handles routine rebookings so human agents can focus on complex situations.

First Help Financial, an automotive lender with 450+ remote employees, experienced this during a snowstorm that disrupted flights for 90 managers traveling to Boston. "Navan's support was quick. It was easy for them to change flights," said Kennedy Hooper, Senior Associate of People Operations.

The platform's real-time visibility allowed HR to know exactly who was affected and could coordinate response immediately.

Capture Lessons Learned

After any incident, conduct a debrief while details are fresh. Document response times, communication gaps, and what resources travelers needed but didn't have. Over time, patterns will emerge, such as destinations with recurring issues, trip types that generate more emergencies, or employee groups that need additional support. These insights should shape your risk assessments and pre-trip briefings.

Take Care of Your Traveling Employees With Navan

Employer's duty of care is both a legal requirement and a chance to show employees their safety matters. The foundation is visibility, because you can't protect travelers you can't see. When employees actually use your travel platform, it’s easier to assess risks, respond to disruptions, and provide emergency support.

Get started with our travel and expense platform today.