Hostile environment awareness training: Building individual awareness while addressing organisational resilience

Michael Blyth, Donald S. Bosch, Chris Williams, Andries Dreyer, Aidan Hales and Simon Mallett
Additional contact information
Michael Blyth: Risk and Strategic Management Corp, USA
Donald S. Bosch: Humanitarian Psychological Services, USA
Chris Williams: CARE Security Unit, CARE, USA
Andries Dreyer: World Vision, USA
Aidan Hales: Kingwood, TX 77345, USA
Simon Mallett: Risk and Strategic Management, USA

Journal of Business Continuity & Emergency Planning, 2021, vol. 14, issue 4, 310-332

Abstract: Humanitarian aid and development is a multibillion-dollar sector, representing millions of organisations, with hundreds of millions of employees and volunteers operating worldwide. The community is, by its very nature, drawn towards danger, supporting vulnerable parties in high-risk areas. In the face of complex global health emergencies, natural disasters and deteriorating security conditions, the imperative for individuals to deploy to, or work in, increasingly fragile and hostile environments is growing. At the same time, expectations regarding the sector’s duty of care are mounting, and employees, families, donors and governments are holding organisations increasingly accountable for their actions. Where an organisation fails — or is perceived to have failed — the people it is supposed to protect, it can face catastrophic litigation and reputational harm. Hostile environment awareness training is part of the duty-of-care strategy for those working in, or travelling to, high to extreme-risk environments. It addresses tactical-level risks by raising the awareness and competency of the individual in identifying, controlling and reacting to security and safety risks. In doing so, it concurrently reduces enterprise-level risks to the organisation. This paper discusses what drives the increasing need for hostile environment awareness training (HEAT), the value it brings in terms of duty of care and organisational resilience, what technical content and immersive learning should be included within a HEAT curriculum, and the challenges organisations face when implementing instruction programme at the global and multicultural level.

Keywords: hostile environment awareness training; HEAT; security; risk; SSAFE; travel risk management; duty of care (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M1 M10 M12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hstalks.com/article/6295/download/ (application/pdf)
https://hstalks.com/article/6295/ (text/html)
Requires a paid subscription for full access.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aza:jbcep0:y:2021:v:14:i:4:p:310-332

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Business Continuity & Emergency Planning from Henry Stewart Publications
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Henry Stewart Talks ().