Even if you don’t know it yet, you’re probably employing some type of risk management in your company. With time, you develop processes and procedures to ensure that nothing goes wrong. You may also have plans to reduce any impact on your business if things go wrong.
Having the right risk management processes in place involves knowing what potential risks could affect your business and having ways to mitigate them. There are many things business owners don’t know about risk management in their sectors.
Below are the six most important things you should know about risk management.
Table of Contents
1. What Risk Management Is
The first question on everyone’s mind is, “What is risk management, and how does it work?” Risk management is defined as being mindful and informed about potential risks to your organization. This involves knowing what could go wrong, both the expected and unexpected.
An organization’s risk manager should be aware of all forms of risks in their industry. Additionally, they should also go beyond their jurisdiction. They should know how these risks could potentially affect the company and find ways to solve them.
The risk manager should also have a contingency plan in place to avoid the problem or even rise above it if something wrong happens.
2. Employee Feedback Is Key
From the CEO to the janitor, all people in your organization will have a unique perspective of your company. That’s because they face different risks when performing their daily tasks. As such, your employees are a gold mine of information, and they are an essential source when identifying any risks to your business.
All your staff, especially key stakeholders, will have valuable insight into the risks facing your business. Unfortunately, no one has encountered these risks, and you would not have otherwise considered them.
One of the best ways to get employee feedback on risks is an anonymous survey. Start by implementing anonymous incident reporting practices in your company. This will likely increase responses from the employees who are scared to come forward in the event of negative repercussions.
You can also conduct in-person interviews with individual employees or even in group settings. Group discussions have been known to work best. That’s because they enhance brainstorming, leading to an even higher number of identified risks to your business.
3. Strong Leadership Is Important
Risk management, especially loss control, starts from the top management of your company. If the CEO or the organization’s head emphasizes compliance, safety, ethical and lawful behavior, the rest of the employees will likely follow suit.
The risk management process requires money. However, the cost of not paying attention to employees’ and customers’ safety concerns will be much greater. If you don’t purchase the right equipment for the job or save some money on insurance coverage, you will likely incur losses much worse than any front-end savings you made.
Today, most small businesses don’t employ full-time risk managers because of their limited budgets. However, nothing should be left to chance. As a small business owner, you can give specific people in your organization the responsibility to ensure that compliance and safety programs are in place and the company is up-to-date on the right insurance coverage.
4. Take Customer Complaints Seriously
While talking to your employees is a great way to identify risks to your organization, you should also take customer complaints very seriously. When creating a risk management plan, customers can help you identify any risks to your organizations through their complaints.
Take some time to check what your customers are saying about you online. What do they complain about repeatedly? What is the main issue reported by customers to your employees?
If different customers complain about the same issue, there is a higher chance that the problem is associated with a specific risk to your business. This is a great strategy, especially for businesses where customers purchase products or services in a physical store.
However, you can also get some insightful feedback from digital customers, which will help you identify and curb reputational risks to your organization.
5. You Should Be Pessimistic
Risk management requires you to operate from a position of negativity. From your perspective, what is the biggest nightmare that could happen to your company? If things went wrong today, what would the sequence of events look like?
While operating from a negative point is the worst way to run your business, it’s an effective way to identify and mitigate risks. Keep in mind that overconfidence could hinder the process of identifying potential risks to the organization.
Thinking that something will never happen or it can’t happen is the first step to failure during risk identification. Sit down with your employees and challenge all your assumptions about the potential problems and risks to your business.
Go through each potential risk and come up with viable risk management solutions. These solutions should prevent the risk from occurring and mitigate the effects of the risk if it happens. This way, everyone in the organization will be up-to-date on what steps to take if an issue arises.
6. Consult a Risk Management Expert
You have probably created a relationship with numerous people to help you identify and mitigate risks. These individuals may include financial advisors, accountants, or even insurance brokers.
For example, your insurance broker will have updated information about your claim history, and hence, they can give you insight into negative patterns and trends. If your business experiences the same type of loss several times, there is likely a risk that’s not well managed.
While it’s essential to have all these experts in your corner, you should consider hiring a professional risk manager. The risk manager is better equipped to help you identify and handle any financial, reputational, and even insurance risk throughout the organization.
If you’re looking for a reputable risk mitigation service, check out First Corporate Solutions. They help companies with SOS business search and risk mitigation.
Are You Ready to Identify Risk in Your Organization?
Risk management is an essential aspect of any business. Identifying the risks facing your organization is key to its success. But identifying these risks isn’t the only task. You also need to develop a risk management plan to ensure you tackle all the risks effectively.
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