He began by talking about Compliance and explained in the context of Fire Safety there were a number of regulations at the State, City, and Federal level concerning how many Fire Extinguishers a building must have to meet the code. That’s Compliance. He then talked about the Fire Extinguishers needed to be in working order and each month someone had to inspect and document that they were working. That’s Audit. At that point, the discussion was about how most companies and people think that is all they needed to do and from a box-checking perspective he was correct. These two things would keep the regulators and fines from happening. Compliance and Audit are two very tangible practices that have no grey area. The big question was do these two practices keep a building from burning down? Having enough fire extinguishers and making sure they work are important but they do not prevent a fire. That’s where Risk comes in . The instructor made the argument that risk is the most important factor in preventing fires and at the same time was the least practiced out of the 3 disciplines. While everyone was making sure they are in compliance and the extinguishers worked in one of the rooms there were solvents being stored by a potential ignition point that no one knew about. If companies could find and mitigate risk quickly would they really need to worry about Fire Extinguishers? How Workers See It Let’s now think about GRC from a frontline workers’ perspective. While they are checking boxes and making sure there are no OSHA fines there are dozens of risks they see every day that can injure them or a co-worker that is not being resolved. Coming into the Safety space with this backdrop it blew my mind that companies were forcing workers to find and report risks aka near misses, unsafe conditions, unsafe behaviors, etc and put them in a spreadsheet to be analyzed to death without making sure they were even mitigated! Data Creates Transparency, Accountability & Action This gold mine of data is only as good as the action taken at the front line. At Corvex we believe our purpose is to create transparency which leads to accountability that creates action. Focusing those 3 principles on real-time risk has proven to not only dramatically reduce injury it also has created a culture that workers embrace and look forward to going to work every day.
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