4 Benefits of Managing Risk Assessment Questionnaires Online

Every organization benefits from a periodic risk assessment audit, to make sure that employees understand and are compliant with company standards, and that any possible risks and hazards within the company are identified and mitigated with as much care and efficiency as possible. 

One way to conduct and involve employees in this process is through the distribution of risk assessment questionnaires. These documents consist of a series of questions that aim to gather insights from employees related to different risk factors related to the company. This can be a daunting task, but tools exist to simplify the process, and the best thing you can do for your organization is take advantage of them. Managing risk assessment questionnaires online offers numerous benefits for the companies that choose to use them.

When You Manage Risk Assessment Questionnaires Offline

There’s certainly no rule saying that your organization shouldn’t create and distribute risk assessment questionnaires to employees manually, foregoing the use of risk management software. However, if you choose the analog route and administer these questionnaires by simply handing out paper copies to employees, you could be setting yourself up for a series of issues when it comes time to collect.

The Pitfalls of Paper

For one thing, it is extremely easy to lose, forget, or damage a piece of paper, which means that you run the risk of never seeing those paper copies you handed out again. Even if employees do fill out and return these hard copy questionnaires, the task will now fall on you, management, or supervisors to take time away from job duties to collate the answers from each participant.

Even putting aside the greater chance for errors when transcribing information, this is a time-intensive task, and manually performing detailed data analysis on the responses once collected will take even longer. Additionally, if you find that you need to make a correction to the existing document, or add more questions, you must, once again, manually print out multiple questionnaires and distribute them to the relevant employees. 

Other Problems

Inconvenience and inefficiency of paper documents aren’t the only downsides of manually distributing risk assessment paperwork. Manual distribution also lacks standardization and oversight. If a manager, when handing out or sending questionnaires to a particular employee, lets that employee respond differently to a few questions because they’re more directly involved with a process within the company, there is no way to track or record this. 

There are also issues involving accessibility; if you need employees in different locations to complete the questionnaire, you open yourself up to the headache of taking the time to coordinate distribution and reporting. And even then, it’ll be hard to keep track of who actually has and has not completed the questionnaire! 

Benefits of Managing Online

While simple on its face, taking the analog route to create and distribute risk assessment questionnaires is rife with potential issues. Digital solutions can meet and mitigate these challenges in a number of ways.

1. Creates a Dynamic and Versatile Organizational Structure

One massive benefit of managing risk assessment questionnaires online is that it will allow you to evaluate risk across any domain, large or small, with an equal amount of effort. Using the power of the Internet, risk assessments can be sent to multiple points of contact across multiple locations simultaneously. The system will also notify you when responses are received and then collate the data itself, so you don’t have to. 

This also greatly simplifies distribution, as the process is not limited – or even affected – by geographical location, granting the process greater accessibility than manual distribution could ever hope to achieve. The more versatile structure created by this method allows data to be collected quickly, efficiently, and in a much more organized manner.

2. Electronically Set Due Dates and Reminders

Distributing risk assessment paperwork online gives your organization the ability to automatically set due dates for completion, and send out automated reminders to anyone who doesn’t meet that deadline. Sick of following up with employees who have their heads stuck in the proverbial sand? Just let the system do it for you! It will also monitor and alert you about who has and has not completed the questionnaire and react accordingly, keeping the process on track and as timely as possible.  

3. Answer in the Field and Delegate Responses

When risk assessment questionnaires are distributed online, your recipients will receive them electronically, meaning they can access and answer them no matter where they are. Tablet and smartphone applications will let your points of contact respond on any device, making responding to the questionnaire so easy that your employees will run out of reasons not to do it. Once they do, the system will be able to track who answered which questions, and in just a few quick clicks answers can be delegated to ensure that the appropriate individuals respond. 

4. Immediate Electronic Scoring

As bemoaned above, collecting information can take forever, and analyzing it effectively takes even longer. When risk assessment is done online, all incoming data will be immediately scored, organized by category, and displayed in reports and graphs. This allows you and any other relevant members of management within your organization to receive an extremely accurate, no-transcription-required, real-time understanding of your company’s organizational risk. Instead of having to spend weeks and even months sifting through relevant data before it can be broken down and analyzed, the most important elements of the risk assessment are available immediately.

ComplianceBridge Keeps It Simple

Risk assessment is serious business, and nobody has the time or energy to waste on trying to effectively handle that process offline. And why should you? ComplianceBridge automates risk, audit and assessment management so that you can focus on what the data you receive tells you instead of breaking your back trying to collect it in the first place. 

Whether lengthy or short, simple or complex, use ComplianceBridge to quickly create custom question sets and digitally distribute them to your target audience. Once responses are received and automatically collated by our system, analyze results in real time, anytime, anywhere. You’re dedicated to monitoring and improving the performance of your organization, and so are we – so much so that we’ve created and perfected the tools to help you do it. 

Ready to learn more? Reach out to ComplianceBridge for a demo today!