Workplace threats can often bring businesses to their knees, damaging profitability and leading to a mass exodus of staff. The key here is to understand your risk environment and take steps to mitigate it. The more you can reduce the threats you face, the more likely you will survive and flourish long-term, without any significant incidents.
Here are some of the biggest threats to your enterprise in 2022 and what you can do about them.
Utility Outages
Over the last ten years, the threat of utility outages was roughly the same as in previous decades. However, in 2022, things are changing. Energy is becoming less secure, and the grid is less able to deal with demand increases, particularly in the cities.
Utility outages cause major disruption for businesses. Customers can’t communicate with them, partners cannot make deliveries and work grinds to a halt.
To prevent this, diversify your energy mix. Install solar on your building’s roof and batteries in your cellar. Give yourself some additional energy that lets you carry on providing services, even if mains electricity goes down.
If that option isn’t available, consider investing in a backup generator. These tend to work reliably, no matter what happens in the outside world.
Brand Crisis
The brand crisis is an increasing workplace threat in 2022, thanks to the emergence of social media. Negative stories about firms can proliferate at record rates, damaging their reputation and causing customers to look elsewhere.
More worryingly, stories don’t even need to be true. Many people will simply respond to soundbites, believing them wholeheartedly.
To reduce the risk of brand crises, leverage social monitoring software. Get alerts whenever someone mentions your brand and then use a crack team to address the issue immediately, using various resources. Don’t let negative sentiment fester, and always act with perfect integrity.
Cyber Attacks Again Top The List For Workplace Threats
Cyber attacks can also bring businesses to their knees. Not only do they deny them access to critical systems, but they can also damage their reputation and increase the likelihood of litigation.
Today’s cyber criminals still use advanced technical hacking techniques to overcome network defense, but these attacks are becoming rarer. Most breaches in 2022 occurred because of human error, mainly employee mistakes. Workers inadvertently install malware on company computers, or they fall prey to tactics designed to get them to reveal sensitive information.
For this reason, firms are investing in phishing training. The idea here is to address the weak link in their cybersecurity architecture. If they can prevent colleagues and employees from giving out critical details that allow hackers to enter their systems, they can reduce the cost of cybercrime or prevent it from affecting them entirely.
Business System Failures
Businesses are essentially arrangements of people, capital, and software that make money. An entrepreneur’s task is to devise a system that makes this happen.
Therefore, when business systems go down, it’s a disaster. The firm can no longer make money, giving competitors an edge.
Fixing business systems is often time-consuming and expensive. So many entrepreneurs are now trying to build “anti-fragile” business networks. The more pressure you put them under, the stronger they become.
This approach goes against the human unconscious proclivity to try to protect the fragile. The idea is to start from the ground up, building a system whose elements strengthen in situations of adversity. It might not be possible in all areas of your business, but it’s certainly something you’ll want to apply in some.
Workplace Incidents
Workplace incidents are becoming a major threat for many companies, thanks to deteriorating social etiquette across the board and the ability to share the inner workings of firms on the internet. Major issues include bullying, sexual harassment, deliberate sabotage, violence, and accidents.
As a company, you’ll need to put robust systems in place to identify these issues and adopt policies to tackle them quickly if there is a problem. Once you have systems in place, these problems tend to become significantly more manageable.
Natural Disasters
Natural disasters are a looming threat for many of today’s budding firm’s thanks to changes in the Earth’s climate and geology. These events are hard to control or predict, but firms can develop plans to respond to them more successfully.
For instance, having first aid and emergency repair kits available on-site is a good idea. You may also want to invest in backup power and utilities, just in case of a disruption of workplace operations.
