#SafetyforLife: Are we at risk? Discussing best practices in risk assessment
Galen Cooter was recently recognized by the National Safety Council (NSC) as a “future leader dedicated to making workplaces safer.” He has been honored among a prestigious group of his peers — young safety professionals that work for our clients and industry partners — as part of the NSC’s 2015 Class of Rising Stars of Safety.
Risk assessment is something that I have been passionate about for many years. For example, I have spent the past nine years with AECOM in a variety of Safety, Health & Environment (SH&E) related roles, and prior to that, served for six years in the Unites States Marine Corps as a Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Explosives Defense Specialist. (I know it’s a mouthful!) A major portion of my duties revolved around providing commanders with accurate and timely risk assessment that would allow them to make sound decisions.
Project managers, supervisors and employees all need to have a fundamental understanding of the risk they are being exposed to in order to make quality decisions. Risk assessment is the general process where you outline what tasks you plan to do and determine the level of exposure you have to the risks associated with that task. Specifically, you are considering the potential consequences of your actions and the likelihood of those consequences happening, then developing methods for mitigating those risks, and evaluating the level of residual risk left over after the mitigations have been put in place.
For the bulk of my career, there have been two major families of SH&E related risk assessments —qualitative and quantitative risk assessments. Qualitative risk assessments require the developer to use personal judgement to determine risk based on general descriptions of risk level (e.g., high, medium, low). This is easy to develop, but offers minimal consistency since every individual may have a different opinion of what “medium” risk entails. Employees primarily based in the office may think that climbing up on a ladder is a medium-risk task, whereas engineers who routinely do bridge inspections may consider it a low risk task since they are used to working at heights.
Quantitative risk assessments include a scoring component where specific risks are measured against a set of benchmarks that have been established by the controlling organization, therefore removing the subjective nature inherent to qualitative assessments. Each individual risk is then compared to the benchmarks and assigned a score. Scores are totaled and a theoretical idea of the total SH&E risk of a task or project can be determined. While quantitative risk assessments provide a more accurate accounting of real risk, they require a significant amount of time, experience and expertise to be developed and used properly. This, and the fact that they don’t always migrate well from safety professionals to project staff, is why truly quantitative risk assessments are only used in a handful of high-risk areas such as the insurance industry, nuclear power and the military.
Having been exposed to both types of risk assessments, and seeing the pros and cons of both, I figured that there had to be a better option — something that would be easy to develop and use; provides some level of consistency across projects, personnel and geographies; and would give a relatively accurate accounting of SH&E risk. By coincidence, I discovered that my primary client a few years ago was already well on its way to addressing this with the “semi-quantitative risk assessment.”
Over the course of a few years, I was able to work with my client and other industry professionals to hybridize a methodology that would fit our needs. With support from my management team, we were able to roll out the semi-quantitative risk assessment methodology to more than 900 staff in seven countries and the program is still in use.
Combining the ease of use of a qualitative system with the accuracy and detail of a quantitative one, I believe that it provides staff, management and safety professionals with the critical knowledge to answer, “How much risk are we exposed to and am I okay with that?”
Galen Cooter is the safety, health, and environmental (SH&E) manager for AECOM’s Design Consulting Services group in the Los Angeles metro area in California, United States. I have spent the past nine years with AECOM in a variety of SH&E related roles, including five years as the global SH&E manager for AECOM’s BP and Tesoro Accounts. I reside in Corona, California, with my wife and two young girls and enjoy endurance car racing in my very minimal spare time.