When you’re thinking about tackling a new project, there are many challenges. Finding the time in your calendar. Getting the right people on board. Managing change. Communicating to your team and getting their buy-in.
Establishing or modifying risk management practices follows this process and can often feel like more than you can bite off. What’s the old adage about how you eat an elephant? One bite at time.
Where to Start?
With anything risk management related, the starting point is always the same: Identification.
In order to identify risk – both in terms of whether or not it exists for your organization and how much exposure you might have – we have to start with an Assessment. Which is why we’ve investing in the development of a comprehensive Assessment program, which we refer to as Compliance Check.
Using the Assessments within the Compliance Check program, you can identify how much risk exists within your organization within a certain topic. Maybe you haven’t kept up to date with OSHA changes after October 18, 2016 and there’s a fair amount to update about your record keeping and safety plan. Or maybe you’ve recently gotten hit with penalties for violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and need to get into compliance quickly.
Whatever the reason, your access to the Compliance Check program will jumpstart your program through a deep dive into the subject you want to tackle first.
Analysis
With the initial Assessment completed, we generate a report based on your completed questionnaire. This report will be a comprehensive guide to what is standard practice; what may lead to fines, penalties, or other consequences; and an action guide to developing compliance in the areas that you want to prioritize.
We may find in the report that you need to improve in several areas. But how do you decide where to act? Here is where the art and science of risk management combine to start having a real impact on your business.
Qualitative vs. Qualitative Analysis
Sometimes the decision is very easy. For example, if you just found out that you should have been electronically posting your OSHA logs in a conspicuous area but haven’t been. It’s an easy fix to avoid a $13,000 penalty.
However, if you’ve identified that you have significant business income risk and you want to really improve your front line risk management to prevent loss in the first place, you’ll probably have a few difficult decisions to make. You just might not have the resources to invest in more than one major initiative at a time.
The discussion then centers around the why behind your decisions. What makes the most sense for our bottom line vs how we want to manage our brand and reputation.
Implementation
Once you’ve identified the risks and decided where to act, it’s time to implement the change within your business. But there’s no need to start from scratch. The resources we provide to our clients helps them to start with a solid foundation.
There’s still work to be done to make sure the implementation is done right, on time, and is effective.
The resources we provide are fully customizable. We know that you didn’t go into business to be told how to run it. We provide the guidelines and the process to help you determine how you want to implement change that keeps your company culture intact while allowing you to improve your bottom line.
Training and Control
The last step is about putting everything you’ve been building into practice. Training your managers and your teams in a new way of doing things. Ensuring that it’s being done the way you want. Tracking the actual results and measuring them against your initial projections. Trouble shooting what’s been unplanned for and how to integrate that into your process.
And lastly, returning the start. In completing a new assessment as compared What did you accomplish? What is what you expected? Is there anything that got lost along the way and if so, was it important enough to go back to or did you find that you were able to get the results you needed without it?