The Importance of Risk-based Decision Making in Safety Risk Management

Background

The process of identifying safety risks, assessing these risks, and developing controls to mitigate the risks is the process known as risk management. Developing a comprehensive safety risk management plan for any business or site is important. Doing this correctly has the benefit to ensure that resources are available and is deployed in such a manner that the mitigate the risks with the highest potential to cause harm will receive attention first thus management can easily justify budgets.  

By identifying potential risks and developing suitable and sufficient control strategies based on an objective set of assessment criteria ensures that the company is approaching risk management in a prudent and professional manner.

The types of risks may be similar across some sites as similar hazards may be present, however, the actual risks can vary significantly from site to site, business to business and industry to industry. 

As an example, most sites have electrical hazards present. On one site the electric supplier may be providing high tension to a substation belonging to the operator resulting in a risk associated with high voltage electricity, while on the neighbouring site the operator receives medium voltage from a substation belonging to the electricity supplier, thus having no high voltage electricity risks to control.

Risk Management

A robust risk management process will result in a set of mitigation plans that will reduce the overall risk profile of a company when effectively implemented. Once the risks have been assessed and the controls that makes up the preventative and mitigation plans developed, the risk management plan should not only detail a strategy for dealing with risks but also include a resilient follow up strategy and close out plans for outstanding issued discovered.

Allocating sufficient time, money, and human resources to plan, execute, implement, and ensure continued compliance is a critical part of the success of any safety risk management program. Such a safety risk management program will not only assist an organization to meet its legal obligations for providing a safe workplace to its employees, but can also lead to significant cost savings in reducing the down time of production due to worker injuries or damage to plant and equipment that are normally associated with an safety incidents.

A suitable approach with respect to safety risk management should be focused more on the identification of the hazards and the developing of preventative controls and recovery mechanisms. Too often companies spend large amount of time and resources on the assessment process, and then they let these results collect dust on a bookshelf.

Risk-Based Decision-Making

In order to move beyond the assessment phase of risk management it is crucial to ensure that risk-based decision-making forms an integral part of every decision that is made in a company. This includes strategic decisions, operational decisions as well as the often-missed tactical decisions, that are made by the teams on the coalface.

If executed correctly, risk-based decision-making is one of the most influential components of successfully controlling hazards effectively. Risk-based decision-making can be defined as the process that categorizes evidence about the possibility for one or more unwanted outcomes such as a safety incident, into a detailed and methodical structure that assists decision makers to make more informed choices based on the available evidence and develop plans prior to start of work to mitigate safety incidents.  It also reduces the amount of changes that occur during the execution of work.

With respect to the tactical risk-based decision-making a process can be extremely simple, provided that it focuses on homogeneous tasks and the correct issues are considered when making the decision. In order to ensure that a structured approach is followed a number of acronyms have been developed to assist working teams to easily remember the steps. These include SLAM (Stop, Look, Assess and Manage), SNAP (Stop, Notice, Analyze and Manage), STOP (Stop, Think, Observe and Perform) and SMART (Stop, Measure, Act, Review and Train).

These acronyms have the aim to guide the working team to stop and assess the situation and look at equipment, activities and environments in their working areas and identify what could create a potential safety incident.

Conclusion

Management and supervisors that conduct risk assessments should not allow the identified controls to collect dust on their office bookshelves, which is a waste of resources. Implementation is critical at reducing a risk to a tolerable level so a task or job can be carried out without an incident.

Implementing the controls of effectively conducted risk assessments can go a long way to change the risk profile of any company, but this is only part of the answer. Empowering working teams to make risk-based-decisions through risk assessments will help the organization gain employee buy-in on the implementation of these controls and it will create a learning workforce that improves its understanding of hazards, over time, in the work and how they can control them to prevent an accident.

Presented by Dr. Carl Marx and Roger Belair.