Prioritizing Resources to Mitigate Hazards

Hello and welcome to our EHS Today webinar, Strategic Safety Risk Assessments, Prioritizing Resources to Mitigate Hazards, sponsored by Origami Risk. I’m Adrian Selco, senior editor of EHS Today. Before we begin, let me explain how you can participate in today’s presentation. First, if at any time you are having audio difficulties or slides are not advancing, simply hit your F5 key to refresh your webcast console. If you are running pop up blocking software, you will need to disable it to view the webinar. And if you have any technical difficulties during today’s session, please press the information help button on the left rail of your console to receive assistance in solving common issues. This webinar technology allows you to resize the presentation by clicking the maximize icon in the upper right corner to enlarge the component window. We welcome your questions during today’s event. To submit the questions, simply type it into the Q and A component on the left side of your screen and then hit the submit button. We’ll be answering as many questions as possible during the Q and A session that will follow the main presentation, but feel free to send in your questions at any time. Be sure to check the resources component on your console for additional information provided by our sponsor, Origami Risk. Also be aware today’s session is being recorded and will be available on the EHS Today website within the next day for you to review. You’ll be notified by email when the archive is available. When the webinar ends, please take a moment to complete the feedback form that will appear on your screen. Now let’s meet our speaker. We have with us today Sean Salvis, who is senior marketing strategy lead EHS for Origami Risk. Joining Origami Risk in twenty twenty, Sean brings fifteen years of leadership experience in EHS and related technology to his role. Previously, he served as vice president of business development with Regscan Incorporated, focusing on EHS solutions and regulatory content. He has also been EHS program lead at Honeywell and a safety engineer and program lead with Intel. For further information about Sean, check out the speaker component on your web on your console. With that, welcome Sean. The floor is yours. Great. Thank you so much, Adrian. I appreciate the warm welcome and welcome everyone to this webinar today. Hopefully, you’re staying cool. I’ve heard there’s a quite a bit of heat out in the East Coast and, in other parts of the country. So, hopefully, this risk assessment webinar today will speak to heat stress in many ways for y’all as well to, talk about how that affects your operations. But today, we’re gonna really get into risk assessment overall, and I really wanna share my personal experiences as well as, generally, methodologies that you can use and, hopefully, best practices you can use to, for your day in, day out EHS processes. So what I wanna highlight today is really around why do we care about risk assessments? Why do we do them? Why do we care so much as safety professionals? And really bring to the table some common use cases that you can that you’re either using today or perhaps you could leverage moving forward. We will be showing you also some use cases specifically, showing you some real world examples, and really highlighting how you can apply it to your industries, and also wrapping up with some key strategies and best practices, really giving an idea of how you can recommend risk assessment methodologies and how you can use that for things such as program investment, safety initiatives, and really showing the ROI of putting more effort and emphasis on risk assessment throughout your organization. But before we get started, I really wanna just talk about the baseline of the scope of risk assessment. And as you all are well aware, working in the safety field, OSHA defines it as basically a way to, defines a systematic process to identify and address workplace hazards that compose the safety risks. That’s how OSHA defines it. This can apply to risk or hazard assessments, essentially. And this is really the scope and the lens of how we will be looking at risk assessment for safety processes in today’s session. To get to a baseline, I really wanna ask the audience today to getting an idea of how you approach risk assessments. And with that, I’d like to start with a poll. And, really, it’s as simple as do you currently conduct risk assessments? So I’ll give you a few moments to answer this question, and we can just see where you are in terms of risk assessment today. You can go ahead and answer this poll, and then we can see the results. Alright. So I’m seeing several results in here. It looks like fifty or so have already answered yes. So that’s a large majority, around eighty three percent. Really good number, not surprisingly. Risk assessments is key. Really, I would say synonymous with safety and EHS in general. It’s part of proactive and, having a culture of safety in many ways. So great to see that you all are doing risk assessments. Would love to hear more about some of the you know, what what maturity level you may be at or even if there’s opportunities to connect pieces to other processes in your organizations moving forward. But it looks like there’s a good baseline of risk assessment throughout your organization. So thank you for that. Alright. So getting into why we care about risk assessments and why do we do them essentially. Why do we care about safety professionals? Well, really equipping your EHS teams with the ability to conduct risk assessments, we are essentially helping them determine where to focus their time, investment, and resources to be more proactive and preventative. This ultimately prevents incidents and injuries and helps keep their workers and in some industries customers safe. Now this is especially true for higher hazard industries where risks are much more pervasive and resource limit is even more important. But not just high hazard industries. Right? You can use this for middle or medium hazard industries. It can be lower hazard industries, areas that you may not see risks like chemicals or high exposure rates. This can be utilized anywhere. Really getting to that common framework and doing it frequently is key to risk assessment activities. Now these methods also, they help reporting communication with leadership and, really, the effectiveness. You can show your results on lowering risk and have it affect your bottom line. And, And, also, I wanna break up integrated risk management or IRM. It’s really a term that we can use to cross the bridge between operational risk as well as overall enterprise risk. And this really helps you work with your if you have enterprise risk management teams, they may be on your your governance or risk or compliance teams or even your overall risk management teams. But really helps bridge the gap of working together and having a more collaborative approach for these risk assessment activities. With that, right, where safety is a key to risk assessment as well as enterprise risk. But, also, don’t forget about other organizations within or other departments within your organization. This can be quality, supply chain. It can even be security, and many others. Right? This is where you can start working and working together to identify and hopefully mitigate the risk that you see out in the field. So a little bit deeper on time and resources and really the focus on this area and really wanna get to is seeing the big picture overall. Right? Getting a deeper look at risk assessments in terms of identifying those hazards, really ranking them by inherent and residual risk, and knowing where to focus first. Resources are typically spread thin throughout organizations, post COVID. So having the the ability to identify those top risks, whether it’s five, ten, fifteen throughout the organization is key, and getting the most effort and resourcing towards those to mitigate those, that is also essential. And what this really does is it enables your team to act on what’s most critical and enabling you to take immediate action on the riskiest hazards and also looking at things like reduction in cysts or serious injury fatalities or even potential cysts moving forward. And, really, in terms of allocating time, this is where you’re gonna have the greatest impact, having those resources aligned to those greatest risks. These practices can help you go from more of a reactive to proactive approach and identify those trends and address root causes for incidents occur. And getting back to collaboration and really strengthen that strategic impact, this is where we can start having those strategic conversations. Turn your insights into action, build that bridge to executive, and as I mentioned earlier, your enterprise risk management teams, and really help leadership understand the value of proactive safety initiatives. What that does, it’s gonna secure more buying and resources and drive cross functional accountability. Really full eagle eye across all risks across the entire organization. So I’d have a second poll of today’s session and really wanna kinda look at the focus on potentially your collaboration with your enterprise risk teams. And with this poll, I’d to ask you, do you work with your your end counterparts and report or communicate on your risk assessments? Now I will highlight this can also be related to potentially your risk management teams as well overall or if there’s another body within your organization that may look at risk at the highest level. So let’s see results here and see what kind of collaboration we’re seeing out in the field from your industries. We’ll give it a moment, you guys can go ahead and answer this. So seeing some results coming in. And, actually, very interestingly, seeing high counts for yes to working with your your end counterparts. So that’s a really promising trend I’m seeing right here. And, really, the idea is that you wanna have that really bottoms up approach, you know, the the day in, day out safety risk hazard identification that we’re doing, you wanna ideally roll that up and have visibility and have the data that supports why those are risky items in operations. And at the enterprise level, they can look at that maybe as potentially overall safety risk and then use that to make the highest level decision on which programs will get the most mitigation effort or even resourcing. So that’s a really interesting thing. Again, love to follow-up with any of you or if you have questions after this on kind of how that works in practice, but that’s definitely a trend that we’re seeing as well in terms of the collaboration across departments as well as the organization as a whole. Alright. So we talked a little bit about the why and also generally, you know, what it can do for you. But why should you even go deeper? And what are those questions you should really be asking? So you’re probably mature potentially in this already. It sounds like a lot of you are already doing it and also also with the teams. But I just wanna highlight some questions you may wanna ask your teams if you haven’t already done so. This can be something like, do your executive teams view your site level risk across your locations, your departments, even facility level? How granular are you getting essentially? Perhaps even are you looking at job or even role risk? Can get into things like similar exposure groups in terms of exposures to chemicals, for example, or any other environmental factors. Those will be key things to look at across your organization. Another question might be is, are your assessments linked to any follow-up actions and training, And are you pushing for continuous improvement? So many of you may even have ISO frameworks in place. You might have system or safety management needs that are requiring you to have safety risk assessment in your programs and policies. This can be an area you can look at how you’re connecting those pieces to ultimately lower that risk through execution. Another question you might wanna ask is, is your scoring or your risk scoring in this case consistent across your teams and your tasking? And are you aligned on what really are the most pressing risks across your organization? And, also, can you benchmark those across your locations? This gets into even gamification. Are you actually using your risk scoring? Perhaps you have a risk score that is across different locations, and perhaps you’re leveraging those to see are there certain sites that may need to have more mitigation efforts or resourcing based on their risk profile. Another question you may wanna ask, getting into more of the ROI side is, you quantify the ROI of your safety program? And then can you use the risk data itself to showcase why more investment or more emphasis on certain risk will ultimately lead to cost reduction, productivity, enhancements, etcetera. And, also, can it drive further investment moving forward for even other programs for your organization? And then one other question I would ask is, are you identifying the potential exposures or just tracking the incidents after they occur? This is getting back to the preventative proactive side of the business. And also, again, leveraging the risk assessment insights and data that you’re collecting and helping you take a more dynamic approach to risk management mitigation. Those are just some key things I’d like to highlight there. The good news is that if you already have a mature process in place, it looks like a lot of you’re already doing risk assessment in a variety of ways. A lot of this data and trending and insights may already be readily available to you today. You can use that to really drive those conversations, drive that culture of safety, and ultimately drive risk mitigation efforts. So next piece I wanna highlight is some common use cases, and this is gonna lead up to really getting into showing you in a really a video in a bit about how we can actually use this in the real world. What are some common use cases we can use? What are ways we can, you know, take those light hanging fruit and try to mitigate risk? And these are areas that I’ve particularly picked out here that I’ve done, even in my days back as a safety professional in terms of key overlaps, key connection points, linkages where risk assessment methodologies, matrices, identification efforts. This is where you would typically tag them and typically do some type of scoring with. And I like to start with your job and task risk. So this would be an area that you all are probably very well aware of in terms of job safety analysis or JSAs or even job hazard analysis, JHAs. This is one of the common processes, I would say, is where risk assessment would be utilized. Essentially, what you’re doing is you’re doing a look at your all your jobs across your sites, your locations, ideally, also looking at areas that have similar exposures. So you can look at risk across different job roles as well. But the idea is that you’re looking at the tests themselves and what risk that may exist. The beauty of this is you can see if there’s trends across your jobs and see if, for example, ergonomic risk may be tied to a certain job, and then that might also indicate that within these set of ten, fifteen, twenty jobs, we may wanna look at putting more emphasis on reducing ergonomics for those certain tasks. So just like that’s a key area that we typically are doing risk assessment in. Lots of different frameworks for JSAs. You may be having, different five by fives, eight by eights, even a three-dimensional version of a risk matrix to identify severity probability impact potentially. But these are areas that you can use to risk assessment methodologies and tie it back to your job risk overall. Getting down next to hazard library or even if you wanna call risk registers, this is the core of really the identification of your hazard across the organization. The beauty of this and really the idea behind this is that you can track your hazards, your risk, and score them across all these different processes and programs. Whether it be JSAs, as I mentioned earlier, whether it may be from an investigation or observation event, you’re constantly, ideally looking for hazards and risk and trying to note them, rank them, and ultimately prioritize them. Having that library in place and having it roll up and looking at the overall top five, ten or so risks is key because that will give you an insight into what’s trending across all of your programs across the EHS organization. One other area, in particular, I say is very common is your audit inspection, even your observational risk. So this can be your daily GEMBAs. This can be your daily site walks, facilities walks. It could even be your corporate audits. It could be your annual corporate audit across your several EHS programs, whether it be forklift safety, fall protection, etcetera. You’re constantly seeing risk that may be from the environment itself, from your assets, from the people working at those workstations, this is where you can again tie risk and then drive them up, roll them up towards your library itself, and then ultimately up to your enterprise risk if so be. I just wanna call out that one because that one is very common across the field. Oh, by the way, also very common in the field identifying via mobile applications as well. If you wanna take pictures for evidence as well, this can also give you a clarification of what indeed was found or what’s what needs to be mitigated. Related to that is incident risk. So, typically, incident risk, this would be an area that would be more on the reactive or lagging side. But when there is an investigation process, this is also a good opportunity to capture the risk as well. And there might be some type of set potential study that’s done during that process. There might be some type of matrix also looking at what’s the potential of this becoming catastrophic. That’s where I would tie in those risks as well and also, again, can roll up to your overall risk register or hazard library. Exposure risk, another key area. This is an area that is very, ingrained in my background as well of being a former industrial hygienist and ergonomist. But this is key to any physical, chemical, even biological risk that you may see in the field. Again, this can be something you can even track during your observation events, but you wanna keep track of this because this could affect your roles, your jobs that are across your organization. There might be a chemical stressor that might be out there that might pose a risk to your entire environment, your entire facility that you wanna keep track of and mitigate. And related is chemical risk. The same applies there. And, really, the idea here is that this can go in terms of the actual exposure itself of the chemicals and maybe be any kind of off gas and that may result from using those in the field, but also can look at even your procurement processes. So looking at the risk of supply chain, if you are bringing new chemicals or substances on-site, is there a less hazardous substance? You may wanna do a risk assessment study. This is big in in the Europe as well, in the UK where they’re doing actual cost studies as well. These are risk assessments at the end of the day where you’re looking at what is the risk of use, what is the risk of how much I’m having at site. Oh, and by the way, is there a substitute that is less hazardous? So lots of overlap there, again, driving up to that overall safety risk. And contractor safety risk, another area that is very common, and this really is kind of inclusive of everything we just talked about where you’re looking at incident rates, risk of potential, usage of chemicals. It can be looking at your jobs that are specific to the contractors that are at your site, but also the risk of having a contractor at sites. This could get into things such as their training credentials, their overall incident rate over time periods, any kind of COIs if they actually have them up to date, for example. These are just common areas where, again, you can use risk assessment, even scoring to identify those countries that may be at risk on-site or maybe, you know, potentially about to get into a bad situation. And then, also, I wanna bring up management change, MOC. This is another very common area that I see risk assessment utilized. This gets into even the collaboration side and stakeholder side that we mentioned earlier. But, typically, this is, in in many ways, a risk assessment activity, but also leveraging different eyes to identify that risk overall. So if there is a change, for example, you know, an asset brought on-site, how does that affect the environment? There may be a risk assessment done by, let’s say, an industrial hygienist or perhaps even the safety leader at the site. All those results ideally roll up, and it gives you an indication of if that request is approved or ultimately rejected. That is where you would utilize that in the field. And then just to wrap up here before we show you some real world examples in a demo, safety management system. So this is core. Many of you that may be either government, aviation, even rail industries, SMS is a common requirement, and this is getting into the four pillars. Safety risk assessment is a common need here, so you have to make sure that you are constantly constantly looking at your risk across your organization, rating them, and ultimately mitigating and having crack CAPAs in place to lower risk for your organization. So a lot of different examples there I wanna bring up here. We’re actually gonna go ahead and show you some of these in action, and we’re gonna highlight really the incident side as well as JSA side I mentioned earlier and also show you some auditing and dashboarding, give you a glimpse of some of the real world examples you can utilize using some technology as well. We’ll go ahead and do that. The risk assessments is the risk register module itself, which serves as this master list of all the risks that credit card to the organization, which you will will then be able to identify and score throughout different modules of Origami. If I come into a particular risk like air quality issues, we can see the main characteristics of the risk like the category and the owner. We can get a view on where the risk has been identified and how it’s been scored. So for example, this risk has been scored as part of a JSA or part of an RCA. There will be roll ups based on these scores that show the total risk, either average or or high water, as well as the trends over time. So we can see if the risk is getting worse or better over time. And then finally, we can associate different types of records, including controls to the risk. The controls will be very important because that will help, with the recommended controls that will come later. So now we’ll show how the risk can actually be identified in different modules throughout origami. The first area we’ll look at involving risk assessments is JSAs. So in the JSA, we’re defining a job, which in this case is a bag house technician, and we’re breaking up the work into individual steps. Then for each job step, we’re able to identify the hazards involved for that step as well as scoring them as suggesting any controls to help mitigate the risk. So in this case, I’ve got one highlighted already identified here, but I can come over here to add additional ones. So then I get the list of risk of my register in here. So all the risk in my register are now available for me to select. I can track them across different, records throughout the system. So if I look at, additional risk here that I wanna add such as slip trips and falls, I can select make that selection. On the next page, then for each risk, you’d be able to identify the controls that should be implemented to help mitigate it. So in this case, the, controls are recommended based on what’s in the risk register. So in the risk register, this slips, trips, and falls, risk already has these controls associated to it. So they are also recommended here and preselected, for the user to already have them available. So in this case, I’ll just leave these controls here. We’ll go to summary at the end that you can review all your selections before submitting. And then I can finally submit, and this will add the hazard to the job step. The next step after adding the hazard is scoring it. So the hazard can be scored directly from the grid, from the menu here on the right, which has different options including score risk, and this will show the risk assessment screen itself. So the risk assessment is configurable based on the organization. Here, we have a pretty standard five by five matrix of probability and severity. But depending on the org, there could be, you know, other factors. There could be other scoring. There could be other ways of this being calculated. So that is some flexibility here. But in this case, what I can do here is with probability and severity, I can make my selections for both the, inherent and then the residual scores. And then when I complete this assessment, I will see the updated scores for inherent and residual risk here on the hazard. And then, additionally, I’ll be able to see roll ups of the risk both at the level of the step and the JSA. So on the step, I can see the average risk from across all the hazards associated to the step here. And then when I save the step, I am also able to see a similar calculation on the JSA showing the average risk from across all of the steps. Furthermore, the risk roll up scores are time stamped so that we can see how they trend over time so that we can see how the total risk of the job is either improving or worsening over time so that we can call attention to the places that need our focus. Hazards can also be identified as part of an audit response as type of audit question attachment. You’ll see this option for add risk. So similar to files, corrective actions, or other things that can be attached to an audit question, risk can also be added on to questions as part of the configuration. So in this question in particular, it’s required. If I open this up, you’ll see that I get the same sort of menu to select my hazards and risk or my hazards and controls before. I can attach these to the audit question. You’ll see that now my requirement updates to complete. Right? And we can see underneath the question each type of attachment, how many they are, and what’s been included. So on here, can see all of the hazards. These can be scored either directly as in this audit or it can be scored later on by a different user. So it gives you flexibility if you just like to collect hazards on the audit and then score them later or do the them all in one process. Additionally, risk assessments are now incorporated onto the audit summary page. So we can see that there is an addition to the score that we normally see for audits. There’s also a roll up of risk scores based on the risk answered on each of the questions. And on each question, we can see how many risk controls were added, what the scores were. And if we click into the record, we’ll actually see the records themselves and be able to score them if from there if we’d like. Another workflow that can incorporate risk assessments is incident investigations. Here, you can see an example of an environmental spill incident in Philadelphia in which we are using an RCA five wise to conduct a further analysis into the root cause. As part of that analysis, we can track all the main details of the typical RCA, including the five y’s themselves. But in addition, we also have the ability to track the hazards now. So as part of this analysis, we can identify which hazards contributed to the incident, score them, and then put in place controls to help prevent this from reoccurring in the future. And then the last thing to show is our dashboard, which will summarize all the metrics in the safety risk register for you. So here, you’re seeing total roll ups of the all the risk in the register. Right? So these are the overall inherent and residual scores for all of my risk. You can see how many hazards pending, etcetera, as well as then rankings of the top. So both by inherent and residual risk, we’re seeing a ranking here of which are the highest risk. We can then break this down further into other categories and characteristics, like, you know, where they rank on each category, counting out how many controls are used to see, you know, where we rank on the higher key of controls, how often we’re using each one. And then we can also plot out the individual records on heat maps so we can see exactly where these different things like JSAs, audits, etcetera, lie on these individual rankings throughout the heat map. So this will help you summarize all of the data that you’re collecting throughout the different areas, and this will enable you to break it down by, you know, looking at very high enterprise level like this to register overall or be able to, you know, further filter data to see things more specific by different areas, locations, etcetera. So that is the safety risk assessment solution, giving you a comprehensive way of managing risk throughout Origami using risk assessments. Alright. So, hopefully, that was a good overview of just some of the use cases that you can see in this next poll. Really, the the big highlights there is what I talked about earlier is the dashboarding is a key thing. Right? All that’s all those processes that were done are essentially allowing you to roll it up and see it across your different locations, inherent residual scoring as well. And then really, that’s just gonna drive conversations. Right? If you’re seeing something that’s trending higher than others across locations maybe across all your locations, then you may wanna essentially do that. This is our last poll. From what you saw in that demo, we’d love to see if your team is conducting risk assessments and which process in particular. So we’re seeing some results come in here. Looking like JSA is pretty common with about fifty percent of votes there. Seeing some for instance and a few for audits as well. And then we have about twenty ish percent for others. So, again, in the we’d love to have more insight into that even in the q and a section. The other use cases is, will be really intriguing as well because there really are endless use cases for risk assessment. It can use be utilized across pretty much any process in the EHS realm. So, thank you for your, support on the the polls here. This will be some of the, other possibilities and use cases moving forward. Alright. So just give you a few more possibilities here, and some of these may resonate with what the other categories for the poll we just did there. But, really, this can be done across any process, even getting into some of the leading edge use cases, things like uses of AI, having automated risk or controls that may be populated based on the environment, also having potential scoring recommendations as well. There’s a lot of opportunities moving forward. Things like predictive analytics as well is a key thing that this gets into as well. Safety scorecards, just lots of areas that we’ll get into the kinda next level of risk assessment and really helps you have those conversations, but also, in many ways, gamifies this whole process. Right? It makes it exciting and, quite frankly, want makes you wanna report a lot of this stuff too because you’re seeing, number one, risk go down, seeing safety improve. But, also, it can be an incentive in many cases for organizations, especially those that have mature programs that reward processes for reporting and reward processes or, you know, methods for identifying risk in the field. So I will highlight the areas in blue a little bit more. This is getting into a little bit more of some of the real world applications. But couple areas, I’m gonna highlight for these in particular, but I want to highlight deeper things like pretest planning. This in many ways, and many of you are probably familiar with this process. This is very common in manufacturing, also construction as well. But, essentially, this gets into it it’s essentially a risk assessment on steroids. You’re essentially looking at processes like the exposures that may be happening, the actual job that’s gonna be happening, the projects work that’s gonna be done on a given day, and, obviously, having a lot of stakeholders involved to identify risk prior to that work occurring. There’s lots of programs that this gets into. I’ve actually done this in several of my last roles, such as decommissioning projects. I’ve done it for areas of fab environments. Also, things like critical lift plans for heavy assets, thinking the HVAC components, things like that. These are areas where I have used pretest planning. And quite frankly, there is a lot of risk assessment involved in this because you’re literally looking at every step of the process, and this even gets into permitting. So during this process, your workers and supervisors essentially are collaborating. They’re assessing each step of the job. So very similar to JSAs. And you’re discussing any kind of incidents that could be previous incidents that happened, potential ones that happened in a prior event for a project, for example. It could even be the day before. The idea is that you wanna identify and note those so you can have a better plan moving forward. This could be things like updating your permits, things like hot work, cold work, line breaking. Maybe there’s some enhancements to continuously improve those processes for that pretest plan for that given day. Again, this is all related to risk assessment because you’re constantly evolving your plans, and you’re constantly looking at the risk that may exist on even a given day. Right? It could be a weather related event that maybe happened that day that may add risk to the project site work. These are all areas you should consider when you’re doing pretest planning. The next area I wanna highlight, and I did earlier, was management of change. And this, again, is a very powerful process from a risk assessment approach. And this is an area where I’ve done a lot of work in my past as a safety professional working with several different groups. So, I used to work with the contractor safety, the contractors themselves, I should say, at a large aerospace organization, but also working with the quality department as well as the operational risk department. These were all the key stakeholders when it came to any kind of decision on if a process program, personnel change, whatever it may be, was ultimately approved or rejected. And, again, this was getting into the risk assessment side to identify, you know, doing this essentially as a task and then getting all the stakeholder feedback to ultimately make a decision. So a good example, this is doing hazops. We did what if analyses quite often. Again, these are getting into risk assessment matrices and and methods. But, ultimately, what it became is everyone, every stakeholder in the process had a say. They had their perception of what the risk was based on the change, and they provide their feedback. And what that became was a lot of times a safety meeting. That became an an actual meeting itself to review the request and see how that risk stacks up against other change requests that were brought to the table. So another example where this is can be utilized utilized quite often in the field itself. And, again, the stakeholder and the collaboration is key to this to effectively executing. Another area that is very close to my heart as well is industrial hygiene I mentioned earlier and also just generally the exposure side of risk assessments. And this is a key thing because, ultimately, this is getting into every possible exposure when you’re out in the field. So you can utilize this approach if you’re doing your audio activities, your observation events, your site walks. You’re typically gonna probably find something that’s whether it’s a physical, chemical, or even a biological stressor or exposure in the field, you’re probably gonna find something when you’re doing your assessment activities out there. So just another example of where you can utilize this. And, a lot of these have risk assessment programs or methodologies that you would utilize for this. Good example of this for IH specifically would be your QEAs, your qualitative exposure assessments. And, ultimately, those, are gonna give you an idea of what are those things that you may wanna do follow-up sampling on. So maybe there’s something you sampled for that you think is gonna be high risk and then you have observed across your different job roles. Perhaps from that, you can actually have an action to go out and do the sampling and actually get the results that will indeed tell you if that was an exposure you should continue to mitigate or have some controls in place. The very common, in terms of risk assessment, connection points, this can be used in the physical side as well. So if you’re looking at ergonomic risk as well, noise, another common example here, looking at decibel readings, high noise areas, those are also areas where you wanna identify risk and also risk to your employees and also mitigation efforts. So just another example where we can showcase risk assessments and have very specific methods that you can use as well. And the last example is ergonomics. This is also really part of the exposure side of risk assessment. And in the grand scheme of things, ergonomic risk assessments or ergonomic assessments in general, they are risk assessments. Many of the methods that are out there, whether it’s NIOSH lifting equation, strain index, RULA REBA, all those different methods that you probably are aware of in terms of industrial ergonomics. Those are areas where you are typically doing some type of risk scoring, whether it be force or exertion or repetitive motions. These are areas where you’re seeing, you know, is that workstation designed correctly? Is that person in the proper posture? Are they doing too much lifting over a given time period? You’re looking at severity probability impact in many cases for those risk assessments. Just another good example of connecting those pieces and then how you can even connect that to things like your job safety analysis. It can even go into your pretask plans potentially as well if there’s some heavy lifting throughout those projects, cycles. Just a good way you can kinda showcase that and, and utilize that throughout for your risk libraries. Alright. So I’m gonna wrap up some kinda key strategies and best practices that, you know, I experienced in the field, but also things that we’ve been seeing from even our clients that have talked to us across their organizations. And, really, what it comes down to is, starts with establishing that consistent scoring framework across the organization. And what this really does is it leads to more consistent assessment methods and really scoring to align to the highest risk. So a good example of that is what I just showed you actually in the demo was the the JSA matrix. It was a five by five severity probability. Your organization may align on that very specific matrix. Perhaps it doesn’t as well, but you should be aligned at least on the common way you’re scoring for certain use cases, and then that can give you a better indication when you’re doing your benchmarking across your locations and facilities of how you’re actually doing in terms of risk mitigation. You should also look at risk from all angles for better insights and decision making. This really gets to the collaborative side that I’ve been talking throughout here, having multiple stakeholders involved in the process, getting to that management of same change process and having, you know, quality supply chain security, whoever may be in the room ideally and talking about risks that they’re seeing. Because you’re gonna get different perceptions, and you may even have different, per you know, may have, yeah, ultimately a different risk score at the higher level based on those discussions as well. So it really comes down to having those conversations as well and having multiple eyes on the field. So this can be, again, quality, safety, legal, enterprise risk as well. And then really getting more influence and buy in at the end of the day, that’s really key to this process. The other thing that is key, and I know many of you are priority doing this, is having a focus on continuous improvement. So at the end of the day, risk assessment is one of the major areas that you can say is supporting continuous improvement, plan, do, check, act, ISO frameworks, all those things that look at risk assurance, risk assessment, and ultimately mitigating risk, it all falls in line with continuous improvement. So I encourage you to continue to do that if you’re not already doing so. And, really, it’s gonna help many, many things, better performance, lower risk profile, ultimately, ideally, lower injury rates as well and lower workers’ comp claims as well. Focus groups, I like to call it as well. So kinda this is getting into the stakeholder side as well, but having focus groups and this can be something that you do by industry perhaps. It can even be be by department. But having a focus group that may be tied to even an industry can provide a lot of value, and it really gives you more unique insights into risk. I saw this a lot in in, you know, years back when I was doing aviation work, and aviation focus groups in particular had a lot of insight. You think about things like bow tie methodologies and areas like that, where they’re actually improving risk assessment methodologies based on those conversation across different airlines, for example. So just an example you can bring out, I encourage you to meet with your industry stakeholders as well and talk about best practices because you can get a lot of interesting insight into making risk processes better. Visibility at all levels, just as our gets into even, again, stakeholder engagement. But, really, having the ability to look at even the smallest risk is key to this as well. It could be something very small that may not even result in an actual injury or illness, but it could lead to a potential catastrophic event. So this gets into things like sift potential. Looking at that small thing, perhaps it’s just an indicator that you see. Maybe there was a a quality issue perhaps that may lead to something even bigger. Look at that and really investigate that because that can ultimately lead to a potentially cash out event that would obviously lead to a lot of loss. Having constant data outputs and really changes and having more informed insights is another key thing to wanna bring out here and really, overall dynamic approach. And, this is getting into constantly looking at your risk profile, if there’s new hazards that are being identified, if there’s new scoring based on new insights. These are things you should continuously be looking at. So I would say frequently looking at this and taking action as needed to mitigate risk. Communication, again, getting to stakeholders as well, but also twenty four seven eyes in the risk twenty four seven eyes of risk on the field is ideal. I know we can’t be there at all times, but if you can have insights and have constant communication loops, that is always a better thing for risk mitigation. And then overall, kinda wrapping up here is your IRM approach, integrated risk management approach. So if you can look at risk, obviously, at our level, we’re looking at more of the operational and safety side of the business and then looking at, you know, things that are happening in the field. But if you can roll it up to an overall, you know, category perhaps, maybe it’s an environmental risk or safety risk or quality risk, these are things you can roll up to a higher level, and then that can give you even more data driven insight into what is real what does it really mean to have a certain certain safety risk based on all these other programs and processes that are giving insights into that. So just some things to highlight there. So I mentioned this earlier, but this is essentially the JSA, example that we showed in the demo right there. But this is getting to that established consistent scoring framework. So I encourage you to think about that for your organization. Doesn’t have to be the exact same, obviously, for every organization. Just as long as your org is aligned on how you score, that is key in this process. And, again, lining on stakeholders and having engagement, always encourage more communication, humanizing safety in many ways as well, right, and making sure that you’re talking about risk that you’re seeing in the field and then continuous improvement. So this is getting into the PDCA that I mentioned earlier as well. And, again, this is, in many ways, risk assessment is a an activity you should be doing daily ideally, whether it’s even a JSA or a pretest plan or even just evaluating or doing observation event. There’s typically gonna be a risk assessment activity happening every day, and there’s probably gonna be improvements you should be making to your process, your programs, and even your, you know, your safety management system in some cases as well. So wrapping up here with some key takeaways, and then we’ll get to the q and a portion of this presentation. Risk assessments are strategic tools. They’re not just check the box exercises. They help you prioritize, communicate, and act on what matters the most. In prioritization, it drives impact. It gives you a clear view of your inherent residual risk and ultimately enables smart allocation of your time, budget, and resources. Visibility. I mentioned visibility and communication a lot in this session, but at least a better buy in. And when executives understand the risk and the potential impact, they’re more likely to support your safety initiatives. You saw some demos of some use cases on using technology, and technology can enable that proactive safety as well. So digital tools, such as that you just saw, they can help streamline your assessment methodologies, enhance your reporting, and even connect your EHS to your enterprise risk strategies. And, overall, the goal is simple here. You all are well aware of safety and and what it means to keep people safe. Send your workers home safely. Everything we discussed today is in that support mission to keep people safe, reducing your incidents, you’re preventing your SIFs, and protecting your people. That is key, and that’s why we do risk assessment at the end of the day. So with that, I would love to entertain some q and a at this point in time. And again, you’ll see some information here if you wanna connect me on LinkedIn. Any questions you may have after the session as well, I’d love to take those as well. So we will get into the q and a session of this webinar. Okay. I’d like to thank you for a wonderful presentation, and I will ask the questions in a second. And I’d also like to remind our audience to complete the feedback form that will appear on the screen at the end of the webinar. Alright, first question. Can you speak to what risk matrix you use? Yeah. So there’s a lot the one that you are maybe referring to from the what the demo that you saw, that was a five by five matrix common with a JSA. It could be conscious of general risks as well, but that’s essentially a severity probability five by five matrix. That would be one methodology. There’s a lot of others out there that I I highlighted. AQEA would be another example, like industrial hygiene base where you’re doing health risk rating on an exposure type matrix. So lots of different types you can use, but, all of that said, what you saw in the demo, that is highly flexible. So if there is something that you’re using in an organization that you’re aligned on, it might be a corporate driven risk assessment. I’ve seen eight by eights. I’ve seen three by three by three. I’ve seen five by five by five. That is something that you can really change however you wish. So just wanna call that out. Good question. Okay. Next question. You may have already stated this, but what is Yeah. Very good question. Yeah. I highlighted it a little bit, but just to be clear, it’s enterprise risk management. It’s very common looking at overall risk, essentially. The the big difference, I would say, with is that they may be part of more of the overall governance side of the business, the risk side of the business. They are looking at risk typically at a higher level. So they might be looking at risk across cybersecurity, supply chain, higher level. Whereas in weekends to our risk assessment methodologies, we’re typically feeding the data that drives a safety score. That safety score could be a risk at the higher level for to look at. That’s kind of how it would play in that in that world. Okay. At what point do you start a new risk assessment for equipment? Example, if it is similar equipment, then the same risk assessment can be used? Yeah. So so yeah. So the equipment side, that could be driven in many different ways. I would say one common way you could do the equipment is if you’re actually doing an asset inspection itself. So let’s say you’re going looking at a boiler, you can take that, you know, if you’re doing if you have certain questions or some things that you’re checking, maybe it’s a, you know, pressure point or whatever it may be. You could also check any kind of indicator of, you know, is this asset itself in need of a assessment itself? Does it need to have, like, a routine maintenance assessment? So you could actually drive that while you’re doing that inspection activity itself. It could also be routine. A lot of you know, if you think about equipment and assets in general, a lot of times it’s already routine. So you might already have a cadence where it’s monthly potentially where you’re actually to go out and do that risk assessment to identify anything that is out of spec that may call call cause a quality concern or safety issue as well. So it it can be flexible based on your business processes. Hopefully, I answered that okay. Okay. This question is how often should we be updating our risk assessments? Yes. Good question. So, again, I would say it depends on your organization. It probably depends as well any kind of certification you may have. I know a lot of organizations that are ISO certified. It’s gonna probably be continuous. It’s gonna be constantly looking at improvement of your overall management system, which risk assessment will be part of. So I would say, it depends. I would also say that, it’s gonna be evolving as well as you identify risk, as you kinda continue to utilize risk and start scoring and looking across your locations. You may find ways to improve the assessment methodology. Maybe things change. Maybe trends change. Maybe exposure levels change where you wanna kind of change a rating, define it differently based on what you’re seeing. I’ve seen this kinda work in industry quite a bit where we would typically go above and beyond what maybe OSHA would say in terms of, like, exposures, for example, or even NIOSH. And we would go, like, ten percent, you know, less when we’re doing our risk assessment activities so that we know that we’ll never meet that threshold that would get us into a compliance situation or an NOV situation. So but, yeah, that’s a good question. I would say free cash would be the ideal. Okay. This question is, how are risk levels initially determined when developing your risk matrix? Yeah. Good question. So that, again, I would say gets more to those conversations you should be having with your key stakeholders. This could be even at the onset of, let’s say, that you’re if you’re just starting out in your EHS journey, you may be having best practices. You might even have your actual EHS programs that are written documents that kinda showcase how you define certain risks. I always think of lab safety or industrial hygiene programs where you actually identify what you’ll be evaluating, how you evaluate, what constitutes an exceedance, for example. So I think a lot of that kinda comes down to the procedure build out phase, when you’re talking to your your stakeholders. So this could be the HS team itself. This could also be your other teams that may be involved in the operating system at your organization. But, yeah, I would say it’s a it’s an evolving, again, an evolving process where you wanna obviously have a foundation and aligned. And this, again, depends on your risk profile too. Right? If you’re if you’re in oil and gas or other industries, you might have to elevate that risk methodology to accommodate that versus maybe lower hazard industries. But I it’s all about alignment and continuously look at it because things are changing constantly. Okay. Can you give an example of how risk assessments have helped secure additional budget or resources? Yeah. Absolutely. So I’ll give you an example that actually I I’ve done in my my past long time ago, but it was actually kind of eye opening. Actually, was one of the main reasons I got deeper into EHS, but it was back, oh, fifteen, twenty, twenty five years ago now. But it was actually working directly with a different department. It was working again, getting the collaboration, working with the quality department to identify improvements to ergonomics. And what that did is that we were able to redesign a workstation that led to less bottlenecks, less defects, and then generated multiple million dollar, enhancements and productivity gains based on getting output. What that led to is more investment in ergonomic programming and then workstation redesign to improve less you know, basically, less twisting on the workstation line as well as more of a streamlined pick and place operation. So that is a very direct example, but that was where, essentially, quality and safety work together to ultimately tell operations and productivity people at the organization to invest more in workstation redesign. So we got new conveyor systems. We got new feeder lots, new conveyor belts themselves, and lots of other pieces that improve the process. So yeah. Lot lot I would say that’s a that’s a good way to do it is to show productivity gains. I like to always connect to quality because I think there’s a lot of overlap of quality as well in the safety realm. But quality things can cause safety things as well. So Okay. And a somewhat related question, what’s the best way to get executive leadership to pay attention to safety data? Yeah. Always a it’s always a tough one. That that is an area that I think is is key and and kind of why I keep elevating the risk story around. Obviously, safety risk is key to track that. We’re always doing that day in, day out, field level operational risk. We’re always identifying new hazards that may be out there. At the end of the day, we need to showcase that and really put money behind that. So I would say if you elevate that safety risk to that enterprise risk that I mentioned earlier, really integrated risk management team and call it, right, looking at the highest level of risk across the entire enterprise. But that is gonna give you an idea of if safety risk, for example, is indeed super high, and it probably will be high, by the way, you can kinda compare it to other risks that may exist in the organization. If you wanna go even granular, you can even do it by, like, say, environmental versus safety risk. So maybe you wanna put in more on safety risk while you wanna maybe showcase safety in a in a deeper realm. But I think at the end of the day, it’s the data and insights that are gonna help showcase the risk that really exists. If it indeed is a high risk, showcase it, show it, show how it ranks up against your other risk at your organization. And then if you can tie it back to things like your incident rates, tie it back to things like productivity issues, downtime, ways you can show ROI are always key. I know it’s pretty common sense, but it’s always been tied to the data is the the key to this. It’s showing how it stacks up against other risks as well in your organization. Okay. And then we have a final question. What metrics or KPIs should should we be tracking to show the impact of our risk assessments? Yeah. There’s there’s really a lot of them, but I would say some key ones, and you saw a few of these in the demo, for example, but looking at overall risk profile is really key, right, over time. So if you look at kind of inherent residual risk over time, and then you can even tie it back to maybe programs or processes or even job roles, that’s always a really good one to showcase that. Even better is when you get into things like what are the what’s the result of workers’ comp claims and claims and things like that. Right? So if you can actually showcase the proactive side, preventative side upfront, and then show the resulting reduction in your incident rates, your t r TRIR, DART rates, whatever it may be. Right? You can even get into things like wellness. Right? What are what’s the perception from my workers of how they feel while they’re working? Right? That gets into kind of a human, the wellness, the ergonomic side as well. Those are all things you can showcase, and even over time. Right? Show a graph show a graph of investment here, risk assessment activities here that ultimately led to lower crane claim counts. Oh, by the way, that reduced in five hundred thousand dollars in reduction in claims and workers’ comp. So that’s always been the most powerful in my mind. I think the perception survey stuff works really well as well where you actually make sure your people are happy because that’s a big thing in worker well-being these days. If people are happy as well, there’s typically gonna be some resulting benefits as well. Okay. I’d like to thank our speaker, Sean Selvis for a terrific presentation today. I’d also like to thank Origami Risk for sponsoring today’s webinar. And on behalf of VHS Today, have a safe and productive remainder of your day.