EHS & Sustainability: EHS&S
Using the Risk Bowtie as an EHS Tool to View Operational Risks
Sustain your focus on Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) risk during significant disruptive events to the workplace.
The importance of Environmental, Health, and Safety (EHS) risk management has never been more evident, especially in the wake of unprecedented disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain strikes, and so forth. As organizations adapt to new challenges, maintaining a comprehensive approach to EHS risks is essential for fostering resilience and ensuring the sustainability of operations. In this context, a holistic understanding of risks—both new and existing—will help organizations navigate complexities and safeguard employee well-being while achieving compliance and operational excellence.
Using the Risk Bowtie for Operational Oversight
Our graphical Risk Bowtie tool in SAI360 software provides a structured visual methodology for managing risks by breaking them down into a series of threats and controls (preventative and mitigating) associated with a risk event.
If you already use bowtie methodology within your organization, you could update your bowties to include COVID-19 as a threat to understand how it impacts your existing operational risks.
For example, the following simplified bowtie for “Falls from Height” shows how existing controls – such as holding handrails when walking up and down stairs or maintaining three points of contact when using ladders – are weakened by conflicting messages to minimize hand contact with hard surfaces to reduce the risk coronavirus transmission.
Applying the bowtie risk methodology can help to:
- Anchor focus on risk management, and particularly critical controls, during disruptive events
- Identify unintended consequences where controls potentially conflict with each other and may result in confusion at an operational worker level
- Provide objective reporting to help prioritize actions and prevent blind-spots
- Engage workers in risk management discussions and increase focus on the reality of control implementation and effectiveness
More insights on using our EHS technology.
