NORTHERN Ireland offers small and medium-sized enterprises excellent opportunities for growth, prosperity and opportunity.
However, risks are implicit in doing business and business risk is a broad category. It applies to any event or circumstance that has the potential to prevent you from achieving your business goals or objectives. This risk can be internal, such as your business strategy, or external, such as the global economy.
Internally, many types of risk can affect your business including IT, operational and financial, as well as legal, regulatory, political and strategic risks. Most of these can pose both opportunities and threats and could affect your ability to achieve your business objectives.
As a business, you should not manage or treat all types of risk in the same way. It is important to understand what type of risk you are facing, before you consider how to deal with it. Risk management involves understanding, analysing and addressing risks in order to reduce them to an acceptable level, or fully eliminate them. As a practice, risk management seeks to protect your business from potential hazards without hindering growth.
Does your business analyse risks before they become a problem? Across Northern Ireland, many organisations choose not to implement robust risk management programmes until a workplace incident forces them to, which is a mistake that can cost a significant amount of money. To combat this, your insurance broker can provide you with professional advice, workplace policies and other valuable resources to help you start managing your risks and help protect your bottom line.
It is also important to create a culture of safety in the workplace, ensuring that your employees feel safe from risk and that they can rest assured that there is some level of protection, should any unfortunate incidents occur.
Keeping up with the latest hazards and risk management best practices can be difficult, but it is necessary if you want to avoid whopping fines. Keep in regular contact with your insurance provider to make sure your business is kept up to date on important risk management topics that can impact your business.
Everything in life – and business - comes with a baseline of potential risk. Insuring your business from such risk can fundamentally ensure that the subsequent losses are mitigated and programmed into your plans.
Through speaking with your insurance provider, your business can be guided through the importance of risk management. This will include the important implementation of systems and structures that proactively manage risk, along with the provision of e-based safety management and employee training programmes.
From this, you can be reassured that you are fully protected from risk across all elements of your business, from intangible technology, to your employees.
Autoline partners with Risk Assess to provide a bespoke online product that offers businesses a suite of management systems that can be deployed across your business structure in order to streamline your risk management processes and reporting. This can distinctly create visibility and accountability at every level of your business. Even if your business is across multiple locations, the Risk Assess policy allows you to access all of these on one platform.
Risk management will deliver more than just protection and compliance for your business. It can enhance operational effectiveness, improve resilience, create employee engagement and accountability. Ultimately, you will be able to improve your business performance and competitive advantage – a risk worth taking.
:: Jacqueline McGivern is key account manager at Autoline Group
