The GRC Process That Will Strengthen Your Risk Posture

Most private, public and government businesses and organizations, including those in areas like healthcare, public safety, education, and financial services, must consider how governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) will affect operations. Changes to corporate a GRC process can weigh down the long-term risk posture of a business, impacting customer and public confidence in the organization. Ignoring risk can also lead to issues that damage an organization’s credibility, reputation, and status. Accidents can also lead to financial and equipment loss and environmental crises. But it is the health and safety of employees, customers, and others involved that ultimately make risk management such a vital component in GRC.

A business that does not understand its risks exposes itself to liability. Therefore, stakeholders from business executives, finance managers, legal counsels, IT directors, risk management professionals and compliance officers, constantly seek to understand the variables surrounding their business. However, even dedicated risk management and compliance professionals are challenged by the sheer number of variables and data points that must be tracked, analyzed, and presented (1). Traditional tools like spreadsheets fail to adequately scale to the needs of large organizations driven by GRC. Therefore, you should consider the strengths of automation and technology.

Implementing effective tools to manage risk

GRC software enable you to create a systematic and organized approach to managing your risk management strategies. Instead of keeping data in separate repositories, GRC software creates a single framework to monitor and enforce rules and procedures. The successful implementation of such software allows you to manage risk, reduce costs from disparate monitoring tools, and minimize complexity for managers.

With a single framework, you can establish goals in the right context to better identify and analyze risk. You will be able to calculate your risk posture after analyzing the consequences of each incident as well as the estimated risk level of each occurrence. With this information in hand, you will be better equipped to evaluate your organization’s risks and create proper controls to mitigate risks.

These procedures involve deep interface between the monitoring and review components and the various stakeholders like managers and third-party consultants. While GRC software can streamline this approach, even the best software will not make a positive impact if proper risk management process isn’t followed (2).

Steps to strengthen the risk posture of your business

The risk management component of GRC and the GRC process requires significant attention to detail at every level of business. One of the first steps is to ensure that the right vision for the company is set by the management team, setting the ethical tone for your business. By setting an example, you help guide your employees and instill a sense of responsibility for everyone to remain vigilant and be aware of risks and other variables that creates risks for organizations.

Another important step is to review the company history and analyze past mistakes. A regular review session of past performance will prevent similar mistakes in the future and provide a more informed framework to guide business processes. A good way to avoid the mistakes of the past is to empower employees so that they can directly create and influence your organization’s risk mitigation strategies and tactics. Inform them about their role and how they can save the business its earnings and reputation.

By empowering your employees, you also start creating a pathway away from silos whereby only a few select individuals have access to vital risk information. Once these steps are in place, you can start looking at mitigating risk by implementing a comprehensive loss prevention program that directly addresses each risk factor. Finally, for risk management to work, you should consider the education of all employees. An effective strategy is to determine each instance where employees come into contact with stakeholder and using those meetings as an opportunity to train and reinforce GRC (3).

These practices can help strengthen your organization’s risk posture by protecting it from losses. Consider using a GRC process software to help assess your risks and design effective means to protect your organization.

Streamlining the GRC process with ComplianceBridge™

ComplianceBridge, a GRC process software, simplifies the way you manage risk by creating a centralized location accessed by everyone in your organization to assess your organization’s risk posture. ComplianceBridge™ is a cloud-based platform that allows you to rapidly build risk assessments or audits. It allows you to design questions of any type in any combination, break content into categories and sections, and use conditional logic to simplify and clarify questions. It also allows users to weight questions for improved risk scoring and reporting.

Finally, the metrics and reporting tools enable you to quickly gauge compliance and spot areas that need your attention. You can even create your own detailed questionnaires, customized risk assessments and forms to incorporate monitoring and analytical elements all within the same platform (4).

Interested in learning more about how ComplianceBridge can improve the way you test the effectiveness of your policies? Request a Demo.

Citation

• Anand, Gurudeo, and Gowri Sameera. “Importance of Risk Analysis and Management – The Case of Australian Real Estate Market.” Risk Management – Current Issues and Challenges, 2012. doi:10.5772/50669. https://www.intechopen.com/books/risk-management-current-issues-and-challenges/importance-of-risk-analysis-and-management-the-case-of-australian-real-estate-market.
• “What is GRC (governance, risk management and compliance) software? – Definition from WhatIs.com.” SearchCIO. Accessed September 21, 2017.http://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/GRC-governance-risk-management-and-compliance-software.
• “7 Ways to Strengthen Your Enterprise Risk Posture.” Lowers Risk Group. April 02, 2013. Accessed September 21, 2017.http://www.lowersriskgroup.com/blog/2013/04/02/enterprise-risk-posture/.
• “Powerful Policy Management Software from ComplianceBridge.” ComplianceBridge. Accessed September 21, 2017. https://compliancebridge.com/products/policy-management-software/.