What is a Risk Assessment?

The difference between a site that manages its risks and one that reacts to its incidents is this process. An assessment turns “is this work safe?” — a question with no measurable answer — into two specific ones: what could happen, and what have we put in place to stop it?

What most often spoils an assessment is that it is written once and then left. The site changes: a production line is rearranged, a new contractor arrives with their own equipment, a temporary walkway opens during maintenance. Each of those makes part of the written assessment stop describing reality, which is why an assessment is revisited at every material change, not only once a year.

The matrix itself is a prioritisation tool, not a verdict. A low-likelihood, high-severity hazard — equipment striking a person in an aisle, for instance — warrants an engineering control even if it has not happened in years, because the severity alone is enough.

Most large industrial sites here run with subcontractors, and each contractor arrives with its own assessment of its own scope. The recurring result is a site holding several assessments that are each individually correct, with gaps between them: risks created by two jobs from two different parties overlapping appear in neither. That gap between assessments — rather than inside any one of them — is the source of a significant share of incidents on multi-contractor sites.

• Risk matrix
• JSA
• Permit to work
• PPE
• EHS

The weakest point in any risk assessment is that it is built on how the work is supposed to be performed. The event records and indicators the platform produces give the team a picture of what actually happens in the same area — how often, at what times, in which zones — so the review is grounded in site data rather than impression. Read about the platform.