Abstract:

Human resource related risks can become a substantial part of business or company risks. Though often understood as “only” dangers of noncompliance with occupational safety requirements and/or employees’ health protection rules and regulation, they can have a considerably broader and more profound impacts. The reason is that human errors as well as management failures that can occur in any area of an enterprise’s activity they can significantly influence company´ ability to reach its goals. Understanding, identifying, analyzing, and preventing human resource risks is therefore a crucial part of enterprise risk management. All the more so because employees´ mistakes are often directly or indirectly connected with management errors or ill-conceived organizational rules and policies that are not quite visible. At the same time, compared to other types of enterprise risks, human resource risks are usually not a top management priority and the tools of their analysis as well as methods of their minimization do not have a systematic character. Moreover, human resource risks and failures are often the cause of corporate problems and issues attributed to other factors. In spite of that, human resource risks can usually be prevented with relatively low costs. The goal of the article is to promote better understanding of corporate human resource risks, highlight their main types and sources, as well as their specific causes, and to examine the possibilities and tools of their prevention and/or elimination.