Six Major Findings and Analysis


Figure 5 Types of Employees in Risky Locations Local Employees 74% 2. Risks andThreats Faced by Employees International Assignees 70% Dependents 45%


International Business Travelers


95%


Risks andThreats Travel expert Ray L. Leki3


defines a threat as “any occurrence,


situation or potential action that puts one’s safety and/or security into jeopardy” and a risk as “an assessment of the probability and consequence/impact of a particular threat.” A comprehensive list identified 37 threats that employees may


Figure 6 Categorization ofThreats Political unrest War Insurgency


Environmental factors


Rural isolation


Political upheaval Remoteness of work location


Coup d'état Civil unrest


Language and cultural estrangement


Natural disasters Lack of air quality Earthquake Flood


Hurricane, typhoon, tsunami


Ash cloud


Illness, disease and lack of medical care


Illness while on assignment


Chronic disease of employee


Infectious diseases (malaria, dengue fever, etc.)


Pandemics (avian flu, H1N1, etc.)


Travel-related infections


Lack of access to Western-standard medical care


Terrorism, violence and crime


Terrorism Kidnapping Hijacking Piracy Lawlessness Accidents Road accidents


Workplace accidents


Travel-related incidents


Lost luggage Lost passport Airline catastrophes Travel delays Hotel fires Pickpockets


Lack of legal and administrative compliance (visa, country entry, etc.)


Violent crime


Opportunistic crime Organized crime Imprisonment


15


Using a Likert scale, from extremely low (1) to extremely high (5), respondents were asked the following question:


“What is your assessment of your company’s risk exposure to each of these threats?”


The overall results indicate that every one of the threats that employees may encounter while working around the world was perceived to be of “medium” or “high” risk, except for one (piracy4


), which was perceived as low. The top five threats—


travel delays, illness, opportunistic crime, road accidents and pickpockets—received a “high” risk assessment.


3 Ray L. Leki, Travel Wise. Boston: Intercultural Press, 2008. 4


Note that in the benchmarking, the term “piracy” was one of the few terms that was not defined for respondents in the lexicon of the questionnaire. After the fact, it appears that this term may have been interpreted by some respondents as piracy (such as attacking ships in the Gulf of Aden) and by others as piracy of intellectual property (such as consumer goods and software). It is likely that respondents interpreted it to be “intellectual” piracy rather than “physical” piracy. This was confirmed as this relationship is only statistically significant when respondents from the IT and information industry are built into the analysis.


encounter while working around the world and organized them into seven threat types (see Figure 6).


First, respondent’s risk perception of these threats were gauged. Then it was ascertained whether companies actually had to deal with any of these employee threats during the past three years.


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