Cultivating a Risk Aware Culture for Growth

While 2021 might already be a couple of weeks old, the question remains: has your organisation taken the time to look back on 2020 and re-evaluate how prepared it was to support its employees and customers, while continuing to deliver critical services and products during the turbulent times that the COVID-19 pandemic brought on? 

2020 was a quite a tough year, to say the least. It certainly was the year where many organisations were forced to throw out their “business as usual” risk management playbooks to simply survive in a weakened economy. Many business leaders were forced to reflect just how effective and adaptable their organisation was when it came to their technology, innovation, acclimation to the changing workforce needs and a disruptive supply chain when disaster struck. 

As organisations around the world continue to pick up the pieces and turn to face the challenges and opportunities 2021 will bring, the mindset that organisational resilience is not  something that can be summoned overnight, has already begun to root itself deeply among forward thinking business leaders and their organisations. 

Is your organisation a risk-informed business ready to take on any uncertainties 2021 will surely bring? 

Saying Goodbye to Siloed Risk

Businesses generally operate with a multitude of departments which can often work in a variety of ways and towards different goals and objectives. While siloed operations can be effective to a certain degree, it has the potential to have a detrimental long-term effect, especially when it comes to risk management.  

A siloed approach at best may deter an organisation’s ability to identify and accomplish its common goals and objectives while hampering collaboration, which could lead to many opportunities being missed out on. 

Unfortunately, business and technology transformations do not happen overnight, which means businesses may be overlooking critical risks or issues and failing to implement, update or even coordinate existing enterprise-wide disaster recovery plans. 

Interestingly, risk and resilience in many organisations often tend to be siloed, leading to a lack of transparency in data management across risks, processes, performances and trends.  

While organisations can operate in separate business units, a single risk has the potential to affect many different parts of the business. Shared methodology and collaboration will be only be created when risk managers work with other key business units to develop new ways of communicating risk. This in turn enable firms to adopt better strategic company-wide approaches to mitigate threats and to grab opportunities. 

The Crucial Nature of Cultivating a Risk-Aware Culture Across the Enterprise

The very concept of a risk culture is ethically driven and value-based, as opposed to formal governance and processes. What does creating a more risk aware culture in your organisation mean for you? Undoubtably, it will result in a holistic and an integrated view of implementing risk management.  

An organisation with a risk aware culture firmly embedded in its core is far more resilient to external influences and far more agile in adapting to change. In retrospect there were many organisations that were able to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic successfully, yet there were many that were not able to.   

Could the organisations who struggled have been hindered by lack of visibility across their business-wide risklandscape? The key benefits of encouraging the development of a strong risk aware culture in your organisation directly derives from agile decision making in terms of both risk and rewards of opportunities.   

Investing in the Right Technology to Drive Organisation Resilience

How can an organisation integrate risk management software that has the capability to drive meaningful decision-making, whilst affording a business to leverage data to identify trends, automatically link issues into risk, and gain an understanding in real-time of what their risk and control position is? Most importantly, how do organisations adapt and show resilience during both normal business operations and disruptive events?  

Camms business solutions have the power to integrate meaningful risk, strategy, project,and people solutions, helping you make the right decisions, manage risks, align talent and focus on what matters.  

It’s time Risk departments position themselves as the department of how-to, so organisations can evolve through disruptive events to remain operational, and most importantly, grow.   

Find out more about how Camms can help your organisation build a risk informed business and request a demo today!  

Sources: CFO, PwC