Duty of Care When Staff Travel
Duty of care is the employer's obligation to protect staff from foreseeable harm, and it travels with them. In the European Union it rests on Framework Directive 89/391/EEC, transposed in Greece through Presidential Decree 17/1996 and codified in Law 3850/2010, which requires a written assessment of occupational risk and measures to prevent it. ISO 31030:2021 is the international guidance the practice has settled on. Applied to a trip it means knowing where people are, what could go wrong there, and who answers the telephone when it does.
What the obligation is
Duty of care is the employer’s legal obligation to take reasonable steps to protect employees from harm that could have been foreseen. It is owed because somebody is at work, and the place they are working in does not change it.
Two words in that sentence carry the weight. Reasonable means the standard is not perfection — an employer is not liable for everything that happens. Foreseeable means the test is applied to what could have been anticipated and prepared for, which is why the obligation is discharged in advance and never afterwards.
The consequence is uncomfortable but useful. An employer who never assessed the risk cannot argue that the harm was unforeseeable. The absence of the assessment is itself the failure.
Where it comes from in Europe, and in Greece
In the European Union the foundation is Council Directive 89/391/EEC, the framework directive on the safety and health of workers, which places the general obligation on the employer and requires the evaluation of risks.
Greece transposed it through Presidential Decree 17/1996, later codified in the code of laws on health and safety at work ratified by Law 3850/2010. The Greek obligations are concrete: a written assessment of occupational risk, preventive and protective measures, information and training for employees, and health surveillance. The written assessment is prepared by the employer’s safety technician and, where the undertaking requires one, the occupational physician.
A company sending staff abroad does not step outside that framework. The work is still the employer’s work, and the risks of performing it in another country are risks that were foreseeable at the point the trip was approved.
What ISO 31030 sets out
Law states the obligation. It does not say how to meet it. ISO 31030:2021 is the international guidance that fills the gap, and it has become the reference point the field uses.
It is guidance for organisations on managing the risks arising from travel — to the traveller and to the organisation — and it sets out a structured approach: policy, programme development, identification of threats and hazards, risk assessment, prevention and mitigation, and review.
Two things about its scope are worth knowing. It applies to any organisation, of any size and any sector. And it covers travel undertaken on the organisation’s behalf, not leisure travel — the distinction that decides whether the incentive trip your company awarded is inside the policy or outside it. In almost every case, it is inside.
What it looks like on a Greek island
The abstractions become specific quickly once a group is somewhere with one road and one clinic.
Medical. Most Greek islands have a health centre rather than a hospital. Serious cases move to Athens, Heraklion or Rhodes. EKAB, the national emergency service, operates helicopter transfers to reach the inhabited islands, and urgent transport from an island to the mainland for a life-threatening condition is generally provided without charge. The emergency number throughout Greece is 112, and it reaches every service including the coastguard.
Water. Almost every incentive or offsite programme in Greece involves boats. That means a headcount that is checked at both ends, a named person responsible for it, and a decision made in advance about who cancels a crossing and on what basis.
Heat. July and August routinely produce conditions in which Greece restricts outdoor work at the hottest hours of the day. A programme that has 60 people standing at an archaeological site at two in the afternoon has designed in a medical event.
Distance. The last ferry and the last flight of the day are the real boundaries of an island itinerary, and both are weather-dependent.
The part that gets missed
Most travel risk programmes are strong on the things a policy document can list, and weak on one thing it cannot: knowing where people actually are.
The gap is nearly always the same. The company knows the group’s itinerary. It does not know that 8 people took a boat to another island on the free afternoon, that 2 hired scooters, or that somebody stayed 3 days after the programme ended and is still travelling on the company’s arrangements.
The fix is unglamorous. A single, current record of who is where, held by somebody who is awake, with a means of reaching every one of them. Everything else in a travel risk policy is an elaboration of that.
What to have in place before a group travels
- A written risk assessment for this trip — not the corporate policy, the trip.
- A single point of contact available around the clock, with the authority to act without approval.
- The medical route from each location: nearest health centre, nearest hospital, how somebody is moved, and who pays for it at the time.
- Confirmed insurance covering everything on the programme — including the boats, the water sports and any activity somebody added later.
- A means of accounting for every person, including on free time, and a briefing that tells them how to reach you rather than the other way round.