In the dynamic and often high-risk environment of modern workplaces, critical risk intelligence is becoming a critical metric for success.
It goes beyond compliance and asks the fundamental questions:
-Do your workers truly understand the critical risks they face?
-Are your critical controls implemented, inspected, and maintained effectively?
-How well is your organisation capturing the perceptions and feedback of its workforce to drive safety improvement?
For too many organisations, the answers to these questions reveal uncomfortable truths. Despite robust safety systems, policies, and training programs, incidents still happen. Near misses remain frequent or go unreported. Safety initiatives fall short of expectations. But why?
The problem often lies in a gap between what organisations think they are doing and what their workers perceive and understand. This gap in critical risk intelligence can undermine even the most well-intentioned safety programs.
What Is Critical Risk Intelligence?
Critical Risk Intelligence is the collective understanding of critical risks and controls across an organisation. It’s not just about having policies and procedures in place—it’s about ensuring that every individual:
Knows the organisation’s critical risks.
Understands the purpose of critical controls.
Implements, inspects, and verifies critical controls effectively.
Sees the connection between critical controls and their own role in preventing incidents.
Can anticipate emerging critical risks and troubleshoot when things go wrong.
Signs of Poor Critical Risk Intelligence
Ask yourself these questions to gauge your organisation’s critical risk intelligence:
Critical Controls: Do workers understand why critical controls exist, how they’re verified, and their role in maintaining them?
Verification Processes: Are your critical controls being implemented, used, tested and inspected effectively, or is this just a box-ticking exercise?
Leadership: Did your critical control verification program turn into a leadership observation exercise, that added little value to the effective implementation and management of critical controls?
Worker Perception: Do employees genuinely understand the organisation’s critical risks, or are safety initiatives seen as a corporate, compliance-driven exercise that is detached from their daily realities?
Leading and Lagging Indicators: Are you collecting meaningful intelligence from safety metrics, or just counting incidents, hazards, open and overdue actions?
Safety Culture Surveys: Have past efforts failed to provide actionable insights into workers’ perceptions of hazards, critical risks and critical controls?
Your organisation may have a gap in critical risk intelligence. This gap can make safety initiatives less effective, limit your ability to measure program success, and leave your business vulnerable to preventable incidents.
Why Critical Risk Intelligence Matters for Critical Risk and Critical Control Programs
Many organisations have implemented critical risk and critical control programs, but how do you know if these programs are effective? Here’s the challenge:
Measuring Success: A reduction in incidents might indicate success—or it might be due to sheer luck, underreporting, or other factors unrelated to the program itself.
Continuous Improvement: Without feedback from the workforce, it’s impossible to identify areas for improvement or adjust strategies to enhance outcomes, purely on safety metrics.
Becoming a High-Reliability Organisation: If you’re on the journey to high reliability, understanding worker feedback is essential to building resilience and embedding continuous improvement into your business.
The Solution: Introducing the CRQ™ Critical Risk Quotient Assessment
The CRQ™ Critical Risk Quotient Assessment was developed by a team of risk management professionals, organisational psychologists, and workplace incident investigators who understand how behaviours are shaped by knowledge, understanding, and perception.
CRQ™ goes beyond traditional safety culture surveys to provide an in-depth, actionable look at your organisation’s critical risk intelligence.
How CRQ™ Works
The CRQ™ tool evaluates:
Worker Understanding: Are your employees aware of critical risks and critical controls? Can they identify critical risks that they are working with? Do they know how to implement, verify and maintain critical controls?
Perceptions and Behaviours: How do workers perceive the effectiveness of your critical risk programs? Do workers perceptions of critical risk and critical controls match the perceptions of their leader?
Program Effectiveness: Is your critical risk and critical control program making a meaningful difference?
Organisational Learning: Are you taking meaningful action with hazard, incident, audit and critical control verification performance data? Do you have recurring incidents?
Organisational Resilience: Are your teams equipped to adapt and improve in the face of changing risks?
Business Continuity: When faced with critical risk realisation, how quicky does your organisation get back to business as usual? How have these events impacted leaders and workers?
The assessment delivers:
Qualitative and Quantitative Insights: Identify specific gaps in knowledge and behaviours while benchmarking your organisation against industry standards.
Tailored Recommendations: Realistic, measurable actions to improve critical risk intelligence across branches, departments, or locations.
Long-Term Success: Repeat the process annually to track progress, measure the success of interventions, and refine your safety strategy.
Why CRQ™ Is the Missing Piece in Risk Management
You wouldn’t implement a new management system without understanding how your workforce will use it. Yet many organisations roll out critical risk programs without gathering the insights that matter most—those of the people working alongside critical risks and responsible for the implementation of critical controls. Their workers.
With CRQ™, you can:
Measure What Matters: Understand the effectiveness of your programs through the lens of your workforce.
Improve Engagement: Involve workers in the safety journey by giving them a voice in the process.
Demonstrate Success: Use CRQ™ to provide tangible evidence of safety improvements over time.
Enhance Resilience: Build a culture that is adaptable, proactive, and driven by real data.
Why You Need CRQ™ Now
If you’re experiencing significant incidents, near misses, or stagnant safety performance, CRQ™ is the tool you need to take the next step. With qualitative and quantitative data, you’ll finally have the intelligence to drive meaningful change and achieve your safety goals.
Overview of the CRQ™ Scoring System
The CRQ™ Critical Risk Quotient Assessment provides a comprehensive scoring system designed to measure and analyse your organisation’s safety culture, critical risk management, and workforce understanding of hazards, critical risks and critical controls. The scoring system combines quantitative data from survey responses with qualitative insights to deliver a holistic view of your organisation’s critical risk intelligence.
Here’s how the scoring system works:
1. Overall CRQ™ Score
Scale: The overall score ranges from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating stronger risk intelligence and safety culture.
Meaning: This score represents the collective understanding, awareness, and implementation of critical risks and critical controls across your organisation.
Benchmarking: Compare your score to industry averages. Identify how your score ranks against top-performing organisations or within your region or sector.
2. Sub-Scores by Key Categories
The CRQ™ breaks down the overall score into focused sub-scores across key categories to pinpoint specific strengths and weaknesses:
Critical Risk Awareness: Measures how well employees understand the critical risks associated with their roles and the organisation’s critical risk program.
Critical Control Awareness: Assesses workforce knowledge of critical controls, their purpose, and how they are implemented, verified and maintained.
Leadership and Communication: Evaluates how well leaders communicate expectations and engage employees in critical risk and critical control management.
Consultation and Engagement: Gauges the extent to which workers feel involved in discussions and decision-making in critical risk and critical control management.
Training and Competency: Assesses the effectiveness of training programs in building workforce knowledge and skills. How well critical risks and critical controls are included in induction and training programs.
Resilience and Adaptability: Measures the organisation’s ability to adapt to emerging, changing or realised critical risks and maintain high reliability.
Culture: Provides an overarching measure of the attitudes, perceptions, and behaviours related to critical risk and critical controls.
Continuous Improvement: Tracks the organisation’s commitment to identifying gaps and implementing changes to enhance safety performance.
3. Hazard-Specific Insights
Hazard-specific scoring drills down into how well employees understand and manage individual high-risk activities, such as working at heights, confined spaces, or operating heavy vehicles. These scores provide targeted insights into areas requiring immediate attention or additional training.
4. Comparison Metrics
Internal Benchmarks: Compare scores across different departments, branches, or geographical locations within your organisation. Identify underperforming areas and celebrate top-performing teams.
External Benchmarks: Compare your organisation’s score to industry averages or top performers to understand where you stand in the market.
5. Scoring Definitions
Each score corresponds to a descriptive tier, helping organisations interpret their results:
Score Range | Definition | Description |
|---|---|---|
90-100 | Exceptional | Demonstrates strong risk intelligence and a high-reliability culture. |
75-89 | Good | Risk management practices are effective but with some opportunities for improvement. |
50-74 | Adequate | Adequate understanding and management of risks; key gaps may be limiting full potential. |
25-49 | Needs Improvement | Significant gaps in risk awareness, critical controls, or safety culture that require attention. |
0-24 | Critical | Immediate action needed to address fundamental gaps in safety performance and culture. |
6. Annual Tracking
Year-on-Year Comparisons: Use the CRQ™ scoring system to monitor improvements over time, showing the tangible impact of safety initiatives.
Progress Metrics: Track which sub-scores improve the most, identify persistent gaps, and refine strategies to drive continuous improvement.
7. Gamification for Engagement
Leaderboards and badges are tied to CRQ™ scores to motivate teams and foster healthy competition.
Departments, branches, or sites can track their performance relative to others, creating an engaging and accountability-driven environment.
Using CRQ™ Scores to Drive Action
The CRQ™ scoring system isn’t just about numbers—it’s a tool for transformation. By understanding your scores, you can:
Pinpoint specific areas for improvement.
Prioritise training and interventions where they’re needed most.
Celebrate progress and build a culture of continuous improvement.
Start Measuring Your Critical Risk Intelligence
The CRQ™ Critical Risk Quotient Assessment is now available, offering tailored solutions to businesses of all sizes and industries.
Every day without CRQ™ is a missed opportunity to improve, adapt, and lead.
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Who We Work With
Our expertise spans industries and sectors, allowing us to tailor solutions to meet the unique challenges faced by our clients. Let us bring this experience to your organisation and help you achieve effective and sustainable risk management outcomes.
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