Just like all other risks, you must include safeguarding risks in your risk register and review them regularly. Your organisation must consider safeguarding risks at both an operational and strategic level.
A strategic safeguarding risk usually comes from outside the organisation. This could include new regulations which affect who you can employ, the types of checks needed for staff (and costs of these) or duties from public bodies you enter into contracts with. Usually these types of risks are managed in a strategic risk register by the CEO and trustee board.
An operational safeguarding risk usually comes from inside the organisation. For safeguarding this could include specific hazards to staff, volunteers or those you work with to experience harm or abuse, managing specific blind spots in the environment or venue or risk which arise from your delivery (eg emotional harm due to your work). As director of operations you’ll usually manage the risk register that contains these risks or supervise registers managed by different teams.
Make sure you know about the different risk registers your organisation has, and where your responsibilities start and end.
When you’re considering safeguarding risks, you must make sure you have thought as broadly as possible. Use our list of questions and add your own:
You must update your risk register at least once a year as an annual review, but it is also useful to update it whenever incidents highlight new risks that you had not foreseen.
To determine if your work managing risk is effective, you need good internal reporting systems.
Last reviewed: 06 December 2018
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