5 Tips for Auditors For Better Risk Management

5 Tips for Better Risk Management 240x160Effective risk management is gradually being more frequently viewed as one of the crucial elements of being successful in business. By minimising any potential perils and their consequent impact on a company, auditors offer a better working environment to organisations no matter what their size. Increase your potential for audit recruitment, and stand out from the rest when it comes to applying for auditor jobs with our five sure-fire tips for better risk management.


1. Continually Reassess

One of the most common mistakes when it comes to risk management is failing to keep your risk plan updated. As the world changes, so do the potential risks. From geographical circumstances and the physical environment, to market conditions and financial situations, every change can affect what potential hazards are waiting around the corner.

To ensure your risk management is a cut above the rest, you should continually assess and reassess, re-evaluate the risks you have set forward, and do so on a regular basis. Effective risk management is an ongoing, continual exercise.


2. Don’t be afraid to re-prioritise

As you reassess any risks you’ve highlighted in the past, you will probably come across the need to re-prioritise. In general, auditors measure risks by their potential impact on a company or a project and their probability of occurrence, but these measures will likely change over time. Reassessment gives auditors the chance to reconsider which risks will cause the largest losses or gains, and this analysis will often result in a reordering of the risk management plan.


3. Training every member of staff to be risk aware

Risk management should be something that is embraced by every member of the organisation you are assessing, especially those who are to be assigned roles and responsibilities within the procedures. Project managers, senior executives and the directorial board will naturally hold a lot of responsibility for implementing procedures, but you should encourage the whole company to embrace the risk management strategy. By ensuring your procedure is all encompassing, lower level employees won’t just blindly look to senior staff members when it comes to resolving and averting risk. Successful auditors in the past have operated bottom up and top down approaches, giving employees encouragement when it comes to recognising risks and taking action.


4. Look at the wider picture

Successful risk auditors will not only look at the impact of several risks on a company as a whole, but how their affects differ on varying departments and hierarchies across the organisation. What might seem like a potentially devastating project risk, may not be so damaging to the company as a whole, so you will likely need to re-score and re-prioritise risks across different levels. Looking at how different risks will affect different areas of a company will help you more effectively implement a more cost efficient risk management.


5. Leave the office

Whilst many auditors effectively formulate their risk management procedures from their own desk, many more are particularly successful when they begin to step into the environment they’re assessing. Companies in the past have benefitted hugely from implementing crowd sourcing techniques in their evaluation, whether it’s in identifying potential risks, or assessing their most important assets. By engaging with what the organisation is doing every day, on every level, auditors can more effectively create a risk management strategy that will be successful.

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