Building trust with clients during the pandemic paid off and helped convince international assignees to leave Ukraine earlier this year, according to Des Donnelly, group SVP – distribution and partnerships at International SOS.
Speaking on the first day of Health & Protection’s IPMI Summit, Donnelly revealed in January of this year in line with most other organisations the firm was advising that it was fine for international assignees to stay in Ukraine.
But he added the firm had security experts deployed in the Ukraine meeting with logistical providers and intelligence contacts to ensure the intelligence it was generating and giving to clients was robust and reliable.
But on 12 February, Donnelly (pictured) said the firm issued a special advisory to clients telling them foreign nationals should evacuate from the Ukraine.
The firm put an incident management team in place on the ground in the Ukraine which consisted of security, operational and intelligence people and a medical team who would deal with clients on the ground preparing them to evacuate.
On 24 February this was followed up by a special advisory about Russian troops entering Ukraine and the closure of airspace.
“The fortunate thing for our clients and for us is because we built up so much trust with them during Covid most of the clients got their international assignees out,” Donnelly said.
“We ended up evacuating 147 people – that was all – almost nothing in a crisis like this and 70% of those were actually Ukrainian.
“So it was very different and the involvement of human resources and of global mobility teams was very clear. As we’re starting to give this advice, for the first time ever in a crisis, we were asked to set up emotional support telephone lines.
“So we actually set up emotional telephone lines for 24 different clients in English, Russian and Ukrainian and that was the impact of human resources and global mobility. That’s a change of how to engage with and also a change of responsibilities that HR have now when it comes to people.”