Avon: Moving securely amidst uncertainty 

Atif Amin, Head of Global Corporate Security at Avon, shares how the global brand is working with Healix to safeguard its workforce through a proactive, tech-enabled risk management strategy.

In a complex and challenging world, ensuring the safety and wellbeing of employees is a top priority for global cosmetics company, Avon.

In this Q&A, Atif Amin, Head of Global Corporate Security, shares how Avon, with operations across multiple regions, has implemented a robust risk management framework to protect its staff.

This case study highlights the key measures to safeguard its workforce while maintaining business continuity and operational resilience. 

What is Avon’s stance on protecting its people, especially while they’re travelling for work, whether that’s in the UK or overseas? 

Our priority is always the safety of our people. We always provide the necessary safeguards, tools and information – including any necessary follow-up actions, to make sure our employees are safe and secure during their travels.

This includes from a health and wellbeing perspective, not just safety and security.  

With some of the risks we have seen emerge globally in the last two years, such as external conflicts and political unrest, have you seen a rising need to protect your people? 

Within the last few years, yes. We have employees working in and travelling to locations with medium to high-risk levels, where there may be challenging circumstances.

This could include severe weather, local events, such as protests and strike action, as well as conflict situations.

We have navigated through various global incidents and for the past year and a half, have worked closely with global risk management experts, Healix, to expand our risk mitigation capability to deliver an effective response to the challenging incidents and issues faced across multiple locations.  

Are there parts of the world where it is proving particularly difficult to protect your staff?  

As Avon operates around the world, it’s inevitable that some locations have higher risk levels. However, we still need to travel to these locations for operational or commercial reasons.  

Our parent company is located in Brazil, and we also have suppliers in India, the Philippines, Turkey and South Africa and a presence in most European markets.

Some of the locations mentioned are medium to higher risk locations and therefore it’s critical that we prioritise the protection of our employees.

For us, this meant working with a third-party risk management expert with the necessary expertise to cover multiple locations. 

What steps has Avon taken to protect its staff and create a culture of safety? What sort of proactive or preventative projects do you have in place? 

We have a proactive approach to travel risk management and use additional risk management services and technology for extra support.

We utilise an alert system, which we use as part of the travel booking process to manage risk at the outset. 

When we have people travelling in high-risk locations, we can proactively reach out to them before they travel as the booking process alerts us to their travel plans.

We can then take the necessary steps, tailored to their itinerary, to ensure their safety. We’ll also gather further information on their travel plans, such as where they are going and what they are doing.  

This becomes crucial where employees are traveling to a non-Avon market, as we don’t have local resources in those locations.

In most of our territories, we will have a local security resource who will review an employee’s agenda and put risk mitigation plans in place specific to their itinerary.  

Can you share an example of where you’ve had to protect a senior member of staff? 

Yes, whenever our executive leadership team or CEO engages in business travel, we’re automatically alerted via the risk management platform we use.

We’ll also connect with the individual to ensure they are aware of any risks and know what support is available.

For example, for travel to a higher risk country, we’ll ask for the agenda, check the itinerary and determine whether we need to provide any additional security support. 

When it comes to the executive team, we make use of additional protective services, such as dark web monitoring to ensure there is nothing malicious online or any information available that could compromise their security, including information about where they live.

Through personal risk assessments, we can review, for example, the security arrangements of a leader’s private residence, the locations they visit frequently, the head office where they are based and provide specific security recommendations based on this information. 

How do you protect your physical assets? 

At Avon, we have an asset protection program. Our approach depends on the location, the level of risk, the type of facility and activity that takes place at that facility.

If we take, for example, our manufacturing hub in Poland near Warsaw, we will have manned security guards and systems such as CCTV access control.

We use either local security managers or local security designees who are responsible for ensuring the program runs efficiently in accordance with corporate guidance/policies.

We also have all our assets plotted on to a risk mitigation platform which provides us with risk alerts.  

The system we use is not just in place to protect business travellers, but also our facilities. If there are any risk alerts, such as a natural disaster or extreme weather events, we’ll be alerted along with all our local asset managers.

Employees are also asked to register their presence on-site at a facility via the app we use, which makes it easier for us to make contact with them in an emergency.

This worked really well during a recent incident in Taiwan.