商务风险管理指南风险中的人为因素.pdfVIP

18 Risk is All About People Simon, a senior IT manager, is taking you to an employment tribunal – because the Board hasn’t automatically given him the departing IT director’s job. You shake your head in disbelief. ‘The job is being advertised on the open market, and no one is stopping them from applying,’ you point out. You ring your lawyers to brief them, only to find that the partner who handles your work has been poached by one of their competitors. She’ll doubtless be looking to take on your work. But will her contract allow it, you wonder? It’s time for that union meeting – they say your performance management programme is tantamount to bullying. From where you stand, every risk centres around people . The HR Department and Risk HR people are often somewhat unengaged with risk management. That’s perhaps not surprising since risk management tends to focus on hard issues: regulations, structures, procedures and audits. There’s also the alienating language. ‘Risk people can talk Klingon,’ admitted Alex Hindson, head of group risk at insurance firm Amline in an interview with HR magazine (hrmagazine.co.uk). ‘And the thing about HR professionals is that they are often in the job because they like dealing with people, not filling in forms.’ Yet whenever there is a crisis or catastrophe, it’s usually down to someone doing something wrong. And when the problem is later analyzed, it was often due to a bad culture: a CEO who’s out of control or staff who don’t care. At other times it’s a lack of skills or a herd mentality. So if the business wants to get people aware of risk, HR is the department that knows how to put a message across and engage people. HR has a lot of data at its fingertips but, as Mary Young of Canada’s Conference Board points out. ‘HR can be woolly and not quantitative, so the risk guys will say it’s not worth the paper. But if you frame people issues in risk, you automatically get people’s attention. T