Posted By Chris Jerman
Angela. This is a great question, but a huge answer in fairness. I'll try to keep it brief for now.
We are a national multi-site organisation with several distinct functions. Each individual site performs its risk assessments, lays them out according to the risk rating and makes a decision about the top 6. (too big to explain that precise mech here) save to say that 6 is enough! These local registers (merely an index to the assessment with a brief synopsis of the issue with the haz, likelihood and final risk score visible for QA purposes) come together centrally to be merged to be one Divisional register of the most significant top 6. At this point the picture becomes a little fuzzier as the very local circumstances get ironed out into Divisional issues. This gives us several registers. One each for manufacturing, retail, supply chain and leisure. What starts to emerge is that there are some very common issues across ALL of those Divisions. Eg MH or pedestrian segregation. These topics are then reported to the Board along with a narrative and proposals for a national strategy. We feel that giving the Board very detailed info on a specific safety issue is not effective (say, manual handling of 4m carpets for example) They don't need nor want that. They want to know their degree of 'exposure' in relation to compliance across the business.
Now this is all working terrifically well. BUT. Your question was, I know, wider than this. What about all of the other risk based disciplines - environment, fire, financial, operational etc etc. Damn good question. How do you make strategic decisions, properly, if the only stream that gives you a cohesive argument (ie not guesswork) is safety and health? YOU CAN'T!
Only now are we starting to assess each location's operational risk and controls assurance in the same manner. Using the same methodology and reporting streams. As yet we haven't any results, but they will be comparable.
We originally thought that we could produce a risk register for the entire business, ie the top 6 'threats' to the business at Board level. In the end, we decided that this wouldn't represent the various stake holders adequately. So there will be a risk register for each subject area. OH, S and Fire would merge and some would be included in Ops as a business risk. In the end there would be about 3 to 4 registers in total, but perhaps reduced to the top 3 issues not 6. We have 68,000 employees so there's a lot to cover, I feel that if you only had, say, 200 emplyees, it may be possible to produce a single register for the Board
Happy to chat through some more if this interests you.
Regards
Chris