Assessing risks
What does being proactive on risk management look like? What simple 4 step process can you undertake to help identify, assess and control risks?
Once you have completed your risk identification, you need to assess and analyse the nature, seriousness and likelihood of harm. This will allow you to determine the severity of a risk, the urgency or priority in which you need to take action and how effective your current control measures have been.
When assessing harm, you should consider all potential harm that might arise.
- People and cultural
- Reputation
- Financial and productivity
- Community
- Legal
Your risk analysis would ideally be documented in a risk register recording the risks, analysis, controls, ownership of actions and review dates.
There are many risk assessment and risk register tools available.
On this page you can download the Risk Assessment Toolkit which may be used to document the assessment process. It incorporates a number of tools to assess likelihood of risk, effectiveness of controls and residual level of risk.
The tools and templates you use should be tailored to your organisation ‘s resources, capabilities and needs, for example, a small or medium business looking to undertake a risk assessment process for the first time would implement a very different approach to a large organisation with dedicated Risk and Health & Safety teams and established risk management practices and tools.
The Risk Assessment Toolkit contains:
- Example Risk Assessment Register
- Example Risk Likelihood table
- Example Risk Impact table
- Example Risk Assessment Matrix
- Example Control Effectiveness Matrix