Every action in the workplace involves risk. From top-down decisions that change the course of your company’s work to the smallest movements in how your products are made, one determination can have a significant impact on how your company performs, and it can be a risky endeavor. While there will always be uncertainty in the business world, there are things you can do to mitigate the potential for unnecessary damage or loss of revenue.
Continue reading to learn about some actionable steps you can implement in your workplace starting today and manage risk in the workplace.
1. Always Protect Your Equipment
Regardless of your business vertical, you will have valuable equipment that you and your team use daily to conduct their jobs. As such, you need to protect these important assets from undue exposure to the elements or lack of care. By not doing so, you are exposing the company to financial expenditures beyond what is budgeted for in terms of equipment maintenance and replacement.
To illustrate, if you have sensitive equipment that may be exposed to temperature extremes, dust, or moisture, protecting it from these elements is necessary to keep the equipment in proper working order and to avoid unnecessary delays from waiting on replacement equipment or repairs to your team’s critical workflows. That is why you should look for specialized ratings, such as “ingress protection ratings” to safeguard the equipment and tools and avoid disruptions in your work and the services or product production that you provide.
2. Provide Company-Wide Benefits Packages
When you offer your employees a comprehensive benefits package as part of their overall pay and salary, you are minimizing the risk of employee turnover due to competition in the marketplace. You also reduce the chances of your valued and highly-trained employees leaving your company due to poor health for themselves or their family members or from a lack of healthcare insurance options.
Risk in any company not only addresses dangerous situations. It also touches upon the risk of attrition. Losing valued and competent employees while spending inordinate amounts of money and time on hiring and training new people to take their places is wasteful and unnecessary in most cases.
Put together a realistic benefits package that helps instead of hinders your employees. This effort of support on your part will help maintain their loyalty to your company while caring for their needs and showing them that they matter. This approach is a win for everyone involved.
3. Make Safety a Priority
Whether your company operates in an industrial capacity or is a producer of goods, or even if you only have employees who spend their days behind their desks, it is imperative that you prioritize safety for everyone.
On the whole, the idea of safety will look the same for every employee in terms of common sense practices, such as wearing seatbelts in company vehicles and avoiding slippery areas on company property. Beyond that, however, is the more detailed necessity of safety training in the workplace. This training will depend upon the kind of company you operate. In addition, each area in the company may require its own specialized and unique training and safety compliance checklists based on the work performed in those respective departments.
Oil rigs will have rigorous safety measures in place that everyone will need to follow, as an example. To ensure your team is on the same page and following the best practices for safety in their respective roles, comprehensive training must take place as part of their employee onboarding. Furthermore, ongoing training is essential to keep the entire team up to date on any changes in equipment or safety standards so that unnecessary risk is avoided while reducing potential harm to employees and damage to company equipment.
Watch this video to learn why you should have a risk mitigation plan in your workplace.
4. Run Financial Risk Solutions
Whenever you are dealing with money, profits, and a market that depends on key factors such as the economy, politics, and the potential for volatility in free trade agreements, your company is at risk of losing money. While you can never fully predict what will happen with these extenuating circumstances, you can do your due diligence and look for possible pitfalls that may impact your bottom line.
Avoid financial risk as much as possible by strategizing your way forward through unknown outliers and rocky business terrain. Any business dealings involve risk, but if you can get ahead of volatility and pull back on production, for example, when you hear rumblings of trade wars or increased tariff threats, you may position the company to weather higher export prices through lowered production during the time of strife.
5. Review Your Business Plan Regularly
A business plan is the roadmap that helped you secure capital funding and explained your intent to business partners. It is a guide to implementing strategy and something concrete to follow to achieve your goals. It is, also, something that should be reviewed with regularity.
If you have been in business for a year and everything is going well, avoid complacency by staying on top of your company objectives. Look at the business plan and determine if you are still on the right path toward success. Have you had any setbacks? What happened and why? How did you overcome the problems? Once you have some new ideas on how your company has performed, you will have a better vision of how you should move into the future.
The best questions to ask, of course, vary by industry. For example, manufacturers can benefit by asking the following key question: “Which competitive tasks could be automated to improve efficiency and save costs over time?” Incorporating an automation strategy using technology from Fanuc Robot, AI, and software into your business plan can help your organization stay competitive.
When you are reviewing your business plan, consider ways you want to scale the company. Look for innovative approaches, expansion ideas, new markets, increased hiring efforts, increased production, new product lines, etc. Find actionable ways you can improve the company and incorporate these new ideas into your revised business plan.
Manage risk in the workplace is important to protect your valuable team members, assets, and overall financial health. Use these ideas to help grow your company through actionable ways you can reduce or avoid the potential for risk and keep everyone safe and productive as your company moves toward greater success.
