Business Risk Managing or Risk Averse - The Choice Is Yours!

Overview

Occupational Safety & Health (OSH) professionals must make a choice to develop their careers and enhance their influence in the current business environment or focus on risk averse legal compliance. We help you make that choice by embracing business risk management (BRM) and corporate governance (CG) and linking them to the management of OSH.

Aims

• To show OSH professionals that they have a choice between two approaches:
• Risk averse legal compliance focused, ignoring the needs & realities of business


• Risk managing, business focused, organisationally developing & people management oriented
• To show how OSH professionals can contribute to a change in the perception of the profession, if they make the right choice.


• To show how the future development of OSH professionals must be based on a fundamental change in their role and the way they seek to add value to their organisations.


• To show how OSH professionals can use organisational and business review techniques and business risk management methods to enhance their added value and command much higher respect within their organisations, thereby adding much more value.


• To show how OSH professionals can use the output from such techniques to propose interventions that can be cost efficient, effective and fully integrated with normal business processes.


• To discuss the additional skills that OSH professionals need to obtain to ensure their added value is maximised.

Introduction

We aim to provide inspiration, guidance and practical advice to OSH professionals about the contribution they can make to the management of risk within their organisations. We show how changing to a risk-based approach enables OSH professionals to enhance their contribution and add value to the organisation, increase their level of influence and provide a valuable input to organisational development. We also demonstrate how they can use a risk-based approach to develop themselves, both professionally and personally. By risk based we mean balancing the maximisation of organisational opportunities and the minimisation of risks, not the too often risk averse legally compliant approach.

We describe how OSH professionals can contribute towards risk management, and introduce our approach for identifying and managing those risks within an organisation that OSH professionals can influence, either directly or indirectly.

Core concepts, including organisational factors, are described and referred to, and we discuss how key aspects of managing OSH risks are vital to the creation of a strategy that will enable OSH professionals to increase their influence on an organisation.

We also describe how OSH professionals can create initiatives to increase their influence at higher levels of management decision-making, and therefore their added value, all within a business and risk management focused approach. Like many other parts of an organisation, the OSH function too often undertakes its activities in accordance with its own self-image and based on 'external' perceptions and expectations of its contribution. This can cause many OSH professionals to contribute in a limited way, ignoring the potential contribution they can make to their organisation and to their professional and personal development.