If your organization is committed to achieving sustainable growth, conducting a comprehensive business risk survey can help you achieve your objective. Most companies and other types of organizations face many types of known and hidden risks. Some of the risks may be known to some people in the organization, but not to others including people generally responsible for identifying and managing risk.
Conducting a risk survey enables your company to measure risk likelihood and potential risk impact, and to gather comments explaining the risks and suggestions for mitigating the risks. Risk surveys are usually sent to senior and middle management across the organization. Some organizations also have their Board members and lower level managers participate in the risk survey.
Every risk survey should be customized to include all possible significant risks. People participating in the risk survey should have the opportunity to include any additional risks they know of. Comprehensive risk surveys typically include 60-80 types of risks.
Risk surveys enable companies to identify and avoid or mitigate risk incidents that can be very costly, that can be harmful to employee or customer safety, that can result in significant lost business, that can kill your company's reputation or that can result in legal or regulatory action. Risk surveys also identify competitive risks, technological risks and a wide range of other types of risks.
Failure to identify and deal with significant risks has resulted in many well known failures and countless less known failures. Following are just a few of the better known failures caused by risks that were not identified and/or dealt with before it was too late: