CAREER DEVELOPMENT INSIGHT
Risk management
Jason Clark CMgr MCMI AFHEA, CIPP training and quality assessment manager, relates this to his chosen risky sport and to the Institute’s Payroll Assurance Scheme
A couple of years ago, I took up the full-body contact sport of roller derby, which put me well- out of my comfort zone. You can break something – done that three times. You can expect to fall. You can fail to understand the many rules; get penalties, not understand them and get sent to the ‘naughty step’ by the referees. (Fewer of your team members on track provides an advantage to the opposing team.) My team dealt with this by ensuring that I passed the minimum skills – there are 28 of them – before being allowed on track and joining the team in training sessions. After eighteen months of training, I made the ‘A’ team and am now proud to say I’m a Crash Test Brummies’ team member. So, why am I telling you about this? Well, Henry Ford said: “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got”. For me, this is the very essence of why we challenge the status quo and introduce new activities
whether at work or in our personal life. Ask yourself, when was the last time you did something entirely new? And how did you go about ensuring you did it right and continue to do so? What you did was risk management. Payroll is a risky business. You must contend with, for example: legislation changes and case law; big ticket policies like anti-money laundering, data protection, and new legislative reporting; keeping the team up to date and motivated; ensuring compliance; paying people correctly and on time; and dealing with customers. How do you take away these risks? It should be simple enough, right? Well, with the roller derby I trained and passed my minimum skills and got up each time I fell. But it’s not as simple as that in business, is it? My dictionary defines ‘risk’ as a situation involving exposure to danger. In the case of roller derby, absolutely as there is nothing more dangerous to me than an
eighteen stone opponent who is trying to pass me at fourteen miles an hour. But in business? Though I’m supposed to use phrases like threat, tolerance, mitigation, assumptions and probability, I would define risk as the opportunity to assess and identify acceptable consequences and changes that may produce a negative (or positive) effect on your business. But how do you put this into context? Let’s say you are about to take on additional responsibilities in your already busy payroll department. There is a huge risk involved, as you are potentially destabilising the department while you are embedding these new responsibilities. You may consider how these would be introduced and what issues may arise. But how do you record the decisions and actions around managing their introduction? This is the heart of risk management. While it may seem onerous it’s time well spent to introduce new steps to the way you make decisions, planning and ensuring risks are worked through to influence the outcome. Although it’s not possible to discuss all
... changes that may produce a negative (or positive) effect on your business
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | June 2019 | Issue 51 10
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