Publisher Emeritus
By Sam Waltz
So, what’s the role of Risk in the workplace?
What’s your Risk Quotient (RQ)?
And what’s the Hazard (H) where you work?
RQ and H each enjoy the privilege of being both technical, specific concepts, defined by particular industries, as well as general concepts. Here, I use them in a general, not specific, context.
As an employee, or self-employed, or entrepreneur, or even a volunteer, can you rid risk as an element of where you go to work?
Hardly!
That seemed the crux of an issue in July between a teacher and a Brandywine School Board member in Delaware.
She wrote her employer, concerned about risk to her health during the pandemic, if she goes back to work as a teacher, selling her services and her time to her customers: the taxpayers, their community and its children.
If you’re not comfortable with the risk in that, the school board member told her, “maybe it’s time to get another career.” (Some skeptics wondered if she was simply after “free money,” to be paid by taxpayers and not have to go to work.)
Clearly, she was telling her boss that her RQ – defined by Wikipedia as “a measure of a person’s natural level of risk inclination” – was inadequate for the H, the Hazards, of her job working with her customers, as a public employee of the taxpayers, of serving them.
Hazard, Wikipedia defines, focusing on its more technical size, is “the ratio of the potential exposure to a substance and the level at which no adverse effects are expected. If the Hazard Quotient is calculated to be less than 1, then no adverse health effects are expected as a result of exposure. If the Hazard Quotient is greater than 1, then adverse health effects are possible.”
“The Hazard Quotient cannot be translated to a probability that adverse health effects will occur, and is unlikely to be proportional to risk. It is especially important to note that a Hazard Quotient exceeding 1 does not necessarily mean that adverse effects will occur,” it concluded.
Employers mitigate hazard and risk all the time. Literally, they do it every day. And millions of people go to work and practice safe behaviors, doing their part to mitigate risk. But, even as risk is mitigated, it simply cannot be eliminated in life, or in living. It’s always there.
When women and men volunteer for careers in public safety, they volunteer to take on an above-average amount of risk. And they’re compensated for it, really today at about the same level as teachers are compensated for teaching in public schools.
When I volunteered for US Army service during the Vietnam War, I was volunteering to put my life on the line for my country, and its people, and what it says it represents. Some people, perhaps many, were afraid of that inherent risk, and some actually fled, or hid, to avoid that risk. Fear may have saved their lives.
Every day, as society learns more about itself, its work, its diseases, its people, the calculus of risk changes. And, clearly, not all risk can be mitigated.
Those same people who the teacher told her employer that she’s afraid of being around go food shopping, to visit the doctor, and to have meals out. They get their cars serviced at Campanella’s, their prescriptions filled at Walgreen’s, and maybe to church to worship. They literally are served by hundreds of people who have dealt with the risk and hazard calculus and decided they have a commitment, that fear will not prevail with them.
Look, I do have a “special sympathy” for the teacher in this, since four immediate members of my family have taught, or teach.
Fear is a natural data point on the continuum of human emotions, and I don’t blame her if she feels a bit overwhelmed by fear. It happens. Not all risk can be mitigated.
And, to me, her fear translates to a sense of self-importance. She seems to feel more important than the person who takes the risk selling her food, or medicine, or servicing her car, or delivering her packages. Yes, certainly, she’s important.
At the end of the day, I come down with her employer, with the school district, its board (which tried to dodge getting involved in that no-win controversy), and the board member, who arguably could and should have used a bit more tact, diplomacy and timing in how he responded, in order not to inflame his employees.
Every job has risk, and every person encounters risk every day in life. That’s simply the way that it is.
Employers should work regularly to do what they can to reduce risk.
But employees have an equal responsibility.
After knowing and acknowledging the risk, if they find more or different risk in the job than they find comfortable for themselves, or their families, or if the risk in the workplace evolves or changes over time, then, as the School Board volunteer counseled the teacher, she should find another occupation.
That’s what I’d counsel any employee. Perhaps a bit more tactfully than the School Board member did, but, nonetheless, the message would be the same.
Sam Waltz is publisher emeritus of the Delaware Business Times.
