How To Develop Your Own Business Risk Assessment Survey

In the United States, it is mandatory for companies with more than 5 employees to conduct business risk assessments. Now, Business risk assessment was once limited to large corporations because it was labor intensive and expensive. Keeping that in mind, we have created a cost-efficient and easy-to-use tool that will help small, medium or even large organizations conduct business risk assessments.

So let’s discuss how to create business risk assessments on Outgrow, but before that, let’s take a quick look at what it is and the steps involved.

What is Business Risk Assessment?

Business risk assessment is a way of identifying potential risks associated with running a business. The process involves identifying, understanding and evaluating various factors that might disrupt the business.

Types of Business Risks

Strategic Risks

Strategic risk arises from the changing dynamics of a specific business or industry. Changes in customer preferences, changes in technology, etc. can make your product or services obsolete.

Legal or Regulatory Risks

Legal or regulatory risks result from changes in compliance guidelines or changes in law by governing bodies. Governments can notify businesses to comply with new guidelines which can involve fresh financial burden to companies.

Financial Risks

Any risk arising from payment defaulters are classified as financial risk. Apart from that, financial risks can also arise from changing interest rates, foreign exchange rates, etc.

Operational Risk

Generally, operational risks are a result of unforeseen events that may occur during the day to day business operations. Events like loss of goods, transportation breakdown, supply chain threats or failures, etc. can be a cause for operational risks.

Business Risk Assessment Steps

How you conduct a risk assessment for your business depends on the unique nature of risks associated with your business or industry. That being said, here are some general guidelines that you can keep in mind while conducting your risk assessment irrespective of your industry.

Identify the Key Threats

The first step to a successful business risk assessment revolves around identifying the potential threats that can negatively affect your business. A few threats that can be identified are workplace accidents, technological hazards, natural disasters, supply chain disruption, foreign exchange rate fluctuations, etc.

Categorize the Risk Types

In this step, you need to make a list of the types of risks (mentioned in the previous section) that your business is likely to face. This will provide a framework for your risk assessment process. As you have already identified your potential risks or threats, now you can associate multiple risks to the relevant risk types. Here’s an example:

1. Operational risks – supply chain disruptions, loss of goods.
2. Financial risks – changes in foreign exchange rates, bad debts.

Determine ‘Who’ or ‘What’ Could be Harmed

Once you have identified and categorized the risks, you should begin to assess the business assets that could be affected. Business assets like employees, company goodwill, infrastructure, IT systems, etc. can be at risk.

Evaluate the level of risk and develop control measures

In this step, you should determine how likely the hazard is to occur and the magnitude of the consequence. Peg each threat with a probability rating and risk level (high risk, low risk). This will help you determine which threats you should prioritize and where you should reduce the level of risk.

Along with this, you should clearly define the steps you can take to reduce these risks.

Run risk assessment surveys to record your findings

Create a risk assessment survey to record all your findings. This will include everything from Step 1 to Step 4. You can use a tool like Outgrow to create your risk assessment survey.

You can even browse through  form templates  for ideas, and then create your forms from scratch with the new idea in mind!

How? Wait for the next section to get all your answers!

Review and Update

Circumstances change with time and so does the risk factor. Therefore, it is important that you review and update your risk assessment regularly.

You can review your risk assessment by asking yourself:

• Was there a significant change that might affect my risk assessment?
• Any recent incident that was not accounted for in the risk assessment?
• Are there any improvements I need to make in my control measures?
• Has anyone in my organization spotted a new problem?

How to Create a Risk Assessment Survey on Outgrow?

Once you have identified your threats, categorized them into risk types, determined the assets at risk and defined your control measures, you can then move on creating your risk assessment survey on Outgrow. Let’s begin!

Step 1: Choose a Survey Template From Outgrow’s Library or You Can Start From Scratch

Outgrow offers a template library that you can use to build your business risk assessment survey.

However if you wish to create your risk assessment from scratch, simply head over to the Outgrow dashboard and select ‘Form/Survey’.

Once you click on ‘Form/Survey’, you will be greeted by a page with multiple layouts and premade templates.

Hover over the layouts and you will see a preview of the templates. Click on ‘Use Layout’ to start editing.

Step 2: Choose Your Language Preference

If you are operating in multiple locations across the world, you might want to choose the language accordingly. For this, head over to the “Configure” tab and select “Localization” . Choose the language according to your requirement and you are good to go!

Step 3: Customize your Business Risk Assessment Survey Template

Outgrow offers an array of customization options. From color themes to gifs to fonts and much more. You name the feature and Outgrow has it ready for you!

Experiment with stock images, gifs, videos, color, fonts, etc. from the “Display Settings” tab. You can also add your company logo here.

Step 4: Add your Questions and Options

As we have already mentioned, every business has different characteristics and type of risks associated with it. So, it is important to ask the right questions and provide the right options.

Once you have determined your risk assessment questions, start adding them to the template.

Note: This template is just an illustration of a business risk assessment in general terms. You can create risk-specific surveys like Financial Risk Assessment, Operational Risk Assessment, etc.

So, according to your need, set the questionnaire and add the options. Outgrow offers a whole bunch of question types like drop-down, single select, multi-select, numerical sliders, etc. so you can play around with that as well.

Step 5: Set Up the Thank You Page

You can customize the Thank You page with gifs, images, custom messages, etc. And thank the respondent for raising the risk issue.

Why use Outgrow as a Business Risk Assessment Tool?

Traditional pen and paper assessments and surveys are hard to conduct. They are not only slow but also messy. An online risk assessment tool like Outgrow streamlines the process and makes it easy to manage. Apart from that, you can avail features like:

• Automatic Alerts – As soon as someone raises a risk issue through the risk assessment survey, the responsible parties can be notified through the inbuilt auto mailer feature.
• Language Options – When you are operating across the globe it becomes crucial to bridge the linguistic barriers. Outgrow supports a whole range of language options to address this problem.
• Detailed Reporting – Outgrow can integrate seamlessly with Google Sheets along with other third-party tools. This helps you track and document all the responses for future evaluation.

Business Risk Assessment Questionnaire

No matter the industry you are in, a business risk assessment should have the following questions in general:

• What is the potential hazard that you have identified?
• What type of risk is it?
• ‘Who’ or ‘What’ is at risk?
• How likely is the threat to occur?
• How big of a threat is it? / What is the level of risk?
• What measures can we take to reduce the risk?
• Do we already have a control measure in place?
• Who is responsible for controlling the risk?

Wrap Up

With an online business risk assessment tool like Outgrow, you can collect the data from any of your business locations and automatically store it in a centralized repository. This helps in communicating the risk hazards to the management efficiently. So, what are you waiting for? Create your own business risk assessment here!