Why Risks Managers Need to Get Out Into the Field with Holly LeClair of ReArch Company
On this episode of Risk Management: Brick by Brick, Jason Reichl joins us from Procore Groundbreak 2023 where he chats to Holly LeClair, Director of Health, Safety, and Risk Management at ReArch Company, an organization specializing in maximizing the value of a project during the early design phases.
In this episode, Jason and Holly get into the evolution of risk management since 1995, delving into how Holly approaches risks, how technology is changing the game, and why it is critical for risk managers to get out into the field.
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Breaking Risks Down
Every risk manager has their own unique approach. For Holly, the way forward is to break it down into chunks.
The first consideration is prevention: “ I think of it as, like a horse and a cart, which comes first? And so, looking at the safety, can I prevent this from happening?” By approaching it from a prevention mindset, it will likely save a lot of money and time in the long-run, as the risks are less likely to happen.
However, prevention isn’t always possible, so then it moves into looking at the claim itself and what the risks are in that.
The final aspect is the whole transaction, “How can it affect us financially?” After all, risk management is a business and so we have to consider the financial impact of any of our decisions and trading.
The Technology Impact
Having worked in the safety sector since 1995, Holly has seen a lot of evolution in all aspects of the industry. For her, the most influential has been technology:
“The biggest evolution for me is how I could leverage technology. So when I think about when I started with what I do, things were on a binder on a shelf and for you to look at the data, you’d have to go to the binder to look at it. Now it can be virtual for everyone to utilize, so it’s more efficient.”
Technology is a standard part of modern life, and modern risk management. As Holly says, it allows for a more central, unified approach to projects, creating far more efficient processes.
Moving forward, it is easy to imagine that there will be more influxes of new technology, each with their own benefit to the profession. What’s Holly most excited for? The ability to keep integrating her data into one dashboard.
Why? Because having access to it will save her time and allow her to go out into the field where the risks are actually happening.
The criticality of getting into the field has become an increasingly common belief among risk managers today. As Holly puts it, “It’s one thing to talk about it, but it’s the most important thing to see it, to see it in action and discover the risk as it’s unfolding instead of after.”
Getting into the field gets you ahead of the game, massively increasing your efficiency, which we all know is a great thing.
To find out more insights from Holly, tune in to this episode of Risk Management: Brick by Brick.
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