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.

A Revealing Safety Assessment Tool

Adapted from a post by Bart Brabham of Learning Unlimited revealing a unique and very useful tool for assessing people’s tendencies to take risks.  Behavioral assessments have been around for many years and there are literally hundreds to choose from.

For the first time, there is now an assessment that is successful in identifying risky behavior and that is a natural fit for the work we do in safety and the challenges that go with it.  SafetyMirror® is not just a behavioral assessment, it is a psychometric tool that measures situational judgment, awareness, and aptitude. This is a fully validated tool that reveals one's SafetyDNA (a true indicator of one’s propensity for engaging in risky behavior) and is known to be a predictive indicator of recordable injuries.

There is also an associated assessment called SafetyMirror 4 Leaders. This particular tool identifies one’s leadership style based on people skills and process skills. The focus of SafetyMirror 4 Leaders is on team members who report to a particular leader. His or her direct reports are at a certain level of exposure based on their leader’s risk profile. This exposure, due to the leader, is a function of the Leader’s SafetyDNA and Leadership style.  Each of these tools provides an excellent opportunity for growth by revealing blind spots and areas for improvement. Used in tandem they can be a very effective in supporting and bolstering an already existing safety culture initiative.

SafetyMirror® and SafetyMirror 4 Leaders provides Leaders and Safety Professionals the unique opportunity to develop relevant and sustainable programs and initiatives that directly address the reasons why people put themselves at risk and how those decisions are made.  It is a revealing and practical tool every business who is concerned about improving their culture and protecting their employees against injury should use.