There are two ways to handle risk: reactive and proactive risk management. Proactive risk management is the best of these: a company assesses risk and puts plans in place to deal with a variety of scenarios. When a business is reactive, they often find that those plans fall short.
Proactive risk management can be empowering and enable a company to feel confident going forward, even after events like COVID. But to do so, they will need the right analytics to make them a more intelligent and resilient organization.
And to really achieve proactive risk management, you’ll need the right technology infrastructure, one with technology at its backbone. How do you do that? Here are some tips as we move beyond COVID.
Lessons Learned from COVID
The COVID pandemic offered a lot of lessons for businesses related to risk management. What was supposed to be a short inconvenience turned into a long-term event that triggered many changes. There are some simple lessons to take away.
- Be prepared for the unexpected.
- Explore new ways to collaborate while keeping employees safe.
- Re-evaluate physical spaces and the risks that come with them.
- Renew a focus on work-life balance to improve employee health.
One of the greatest risks to a company involves its people: stress and anxiety can lead to missed days of work, a drop in productivity, and even more serious health issues that directly impact the bottom line.
Keeping employees and customers both happy and safe should be a top priority, and the COVID pandemic forced companies to take a closer look at both.
COVID Recovery
As companies recover from COVID, one of the keys to proactive risk management is to take new steps to build a stronger risk management plan. They include:
- Designate a crisis response team to prepare for the next inevitable disruption. Make sure it aligns with your strategy, goals, and purpose. Integrate this resilience plan into every aspect of your business operations.
- Break down silos between teams and make sure they are all on the same page and prepared to work together by sharing tools and technology for an efficient response to any crisis.
- Revisit and rethink your crisis management strategy and structure, and work to constantly improve as you learn from new data and updated models.
The key is to realize that while COVID may not even be over, now is the time to learn from these events and put processes in place to handle risk going forward. This will enable resiliency across your organization.
Resiliency in the Face of Risk
Resiliency often wains over time, especially under a state of constant risk like the one we experienced with COVID. Several times throughout the pandemic it felt like the risk might be waning when another variant or wave of regulations would emerge.
To remain resilient in the face of risk, a company needs more than just a solid plan and a proactive risk management strategy. The other key is for personnel to both understand that risk management plan and have confidence in it.
This means that leadership must illustrate and pass on that resilience and confidence, and be prepared to answer questions from both employees and clients. This relates to your reputational resilience as well. Can people count on you and your team in the face of risk? Maintaining that reputation is a large part of proactive resilience.
One way to do that is to draw confidence from what you know, not what you suppose.
Making Data-Driven Decisions
So what do you know? Perhaps the biggest key to proactive risk management is the gathering of data and the analysis of that data. With advanced data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, you can be sure that you and your team are equipped with the information you need to make the best decisions possible at that time.
All of your risk data, both insurable and non-insurable should be gathered in the same place, giving you an overall view of risk across departments and your entire organization. This not only fosters better problem-solving but renewed confidence in the problem-solving process.
What you need is a complete, visual data story. This helps you make decisions and predictions that are data-driven.
Moving Beyond COVID
For many companies, COVID may have felt like an ongoing nightmare, but with the right vision, it can present companies with new and exciting opportunities, and the chance to develop truly data-rich and proactive risk management plans they can count on no matter what the next disruption looks like.
Where do you turn for these data-driven solutions? Ventiv has the right software for you, enabling you to dissolve silos and share information, gather data all in one place, and make better data-driven decisions.
Want to be one of the most resilient businesses around, and prepared for the next disruption, whatever that might look like? Check out Ventiv today. We’d love to partner with you for all your proactive risk management needs.
