Assessing Personal Risk Tolerance

Who Are Your Risk Takers?

People respond to risk in vastly different ways. That's why some people like to jump out of perfectly good airplanes and others don't. Knowing how to assess your personal risk tolerance can help you avoid injury on the job, and knowing who your risk takers are in your organization will help you keep your incident rates low.

Everyone has a different perception of what is risky and what isn't. In the workplace, these perceptions are generally based on three factors:

• Personal Factors (level of experience, skill level, state of mind, physical factors)
• Organizational Factors (safety systems and processes, leadership behaviors and influence, co-workers behaviors and influence)
• Situational Factors (standing in the way, cluttered workspace, poor body position, poor preventative maintenance, etc.)

Our understanding of these factors and our personal decision making process while in proximity to a hazard often makes the difference in seeing a positive or negative outcome from that exposure. Terry L. Mathis of ProAct Safety, and one of the most influential thought leaders in safety, has stated that gathering good exposure data can help make a difference in how workers interpret risk. Data that is detailed and accurate will serve to focus worker safety efforts and avoid unnecessary risk taking (TL Mathis, 2015, Humans are Risk Takers, Blog).

Do you know who your risk takers are in your organization? How do you identify them? Making the effort to identify them may help you focus your safety efforts more productively and mitigate unsafe behavior in your workplace.