Strategic HR Risk Management Planning – Are You Prepared?
If one thing that both our current events and socioconomic conditions has taught us is that for all our contingency planning, we are normally only prepared for high probability, high impact scenarios. Who could have predicted the economic downturn and the severe loss of jobs that we began to experience as early as 2007?
But the bigger question is how prepared were you and your organization for the conditions we now find ourselves faced? Many reacted fairly quickly through various tactics that included hiring “freezes”, carefully orchestrated down-sizing, furloughs, etc. Perhaps the biggest lesson we learned as HR business professionals is that we are not immune to ensuring we have an effective, proactive risk management plan in place to decrease the impact of the unknown, while also ensuring we are prepared for events that have a high probability of occurring. I am not going to get into probability or statistics, but the point is this: We must ensure that our HR risk management planning and implementation processes are vibrant and continuously adjusted minimizing the impact of unforeseen, high-risk, high-impact events. Furthermore our HR risk management planning must effectively integrate with the overarching organizational risk management plan – a key component therein. Continue reading »