There can be no more important aspect to running a successful company than risk management. We have seen how companies unprepared for potential risk were easily destroyed. All you need do is think back to Enron, 9/11, and the disaster created by Hurricane Sandy.
Risk management and awareness, of course, starts at the top for any small business. You know, as a small business owner, that your risk vulnerability lurks everywhere within the business. Turning your employees into risk awareness fanatics could be just the answer to making your company as secure and as prepared as possible.
Educate your employees on risk management and risk mitigation. Few frontline workers even have a concept about such things. It is up to the small business owner to create regular workshops and seminars designed to educate and enlighten every employee. In this way, every employee becomes a risk manager. In this way, you are able to spread out your risk management rather than leave it up to just one person or small team where complacency is always ready to rear its ugly head.
This means, of course, that your employees must be more intimately involved in the business especially its procedures and internal processes. They must know what each person in the company does and how everyone is a vital link in the risk mitigation process. Often, much larger companies ask their departments or divisions for regular risk updates. This can be done on a smaller scale, also. Only the employee doing their particular job everyday can really see where their processes are vulnerable or where a future risk might emanate from.
In the mind of any risk management advisor are two major considerations you should be impressing upon your employees. One is what would be the damage from a particular identified risk and the other would be for them to ponder of what importance to the company if that risk did not ever occur. This will allow the small business owner to calculate how critical a potential risk might be.
One of the residual benefits to employing the spread out risk management strategy is that it brings everyone in your business closer. It provides your employees with the feeling that what they do really matters to the company’s success. It will increase their dedication, their loyalty, and their morale.
-Written by Kevin Sawyer
