Behavioral risk to capital

The risks that never appear on the register. Measured.

Somewhere in your company there is a list of everything that can hurt it. The machines are insured, the receivables are hedged. There may even be a policy on the lobby art. You don’t have to care about risks to capital, because caring is somebody’s job.

Except for the ones that are behavioral. Caring about those is apparently nobody’s job. No numbers, no thresholds, no alarm. None of it shows up in the version of the company the slides describe. But all of it shows up for work.

These risks are perfectly measurable. Not with mood surveys, but with validated instruments from industrial sociology.

The four most expensive behavioral risks. And how they come about.

Burnout

Which teams are running on borrowed capacity?

Your observation: The risk situation looks unremarkable.The risk situation looks elevated.The risk situation looks critical.The risk situation looks serious.

Personnel turnover

Which teams are creating conditions that make people want to leave?

Your observation: The risk situation looks unremarkable.The risk situation looks elevated.The risk situation looks critical.The risk situation looks serious.

Bad news delay

Can bad news reach you in time?

Your observation: The risk situation looks unremarkable.The risk situation looks elevated.The risk situation looks critical.The risk situation looks serious.

Cross-unit friction

Where do handovers create friction?

Your observation: The risk situation looks unremarkable.The risk situation looks elevated.The risk situation looks critical.The risk situation looks serious.

What you get

Measurements per team, for whichever of the four risks brought you here. Hard numbers, for a real risk assessment. Plus recommendations that follow from them: what to change, in which team, and in what order. Specific to your teams, not adapted from best practice.

This rests on a validated, peer-reviewed instrument from industrial sociology, deployed across the unit’s teams. Targeted interviews come in where a number alone is not enough.

We measure conditions, not individuals. No individual assessments, no named lists, group-level reporting only, participation anonymous. A design works councils tend to go along with.

EUR 15,000, fixed.
One organizational unit, typically three to four weeks.

If one of these four topics held your attention longer than the others, that is usually not a coincidence. Talk to us.

Get in touch

Burnout

Which teams are running on borrowed capacity?

The risk

The absence is only the visible part: someone is out for eight weeks, the work redistributes, the colleagues compensate. The expensive part came earlier: the months of sitting at the desk and producing less, unnoticed, because presence is easily mistaken for capacity. The cost of absence is obvious. What precedes it is not: presenteeism is estimated to cost 1.5 to 10 times more than the absence itself.1 When teams burn out, you keep paying full price for capacity you no longer receive.

The risk to your capital is not the singular event, it’s the conditions that produced it. And if they are still in place, so is the next case, ready to happen.

Footnotes

  1. Hassard et al., 2018, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. ↩

Have you seen this in your teams?

Whether you see it again depends on conditions that may still be in place.

Burnout rarely files a report before it arrives. The conditions are measurable long before the first absence, which is the only useful time to look.

Then go by what you see. This is about conditions, not cases.

Recovery

0 = After workload peaks, load returns to sustainable levels · 100 = The peak is the new normal

Coverage

0 = Absences are absorbed by a plan · 100 = Absences are absorbed by the same few people

Visibility

0 = Overload surfaces before performance drops · 100 = Overload surfaces only after performance drops

Your answers never leave this page. They are just stored in the browser session for your convenience.

What you see

The risk situation looks unremarkable.

By your read, your teams work under conditions that give this risk little to work with.

The risk situation looks elevated.

By your read, nothing here is really critical. Nothing is really fine either.

The risk situation looks critical.

By your read, one condition is strongly pronounced. The others do not compensate for it.

The risk situation looks serious.

By your read, several conditions are at the critical end: . That is the combination that gets expensive.

Load that never recedes isn't a peak. It's the new baseline.

When absences are absorbed by the same few people, the plan is a person.

If overload only surfaces after performance drops, the damage is your early-warning system.

A read is a starting point, not a finding. What stays open is which teams are affected, how strong the risk is, and whether it holds at all. That is what we measure.

What we do

We measure the strain cluster per team – workload, cognitive and emotional strain, predictability of work. The conditions that produce burnout, not the individuals carrying them.

You receive measurements for every team in the unit, never for a single person, and recommendations that follow from them: what to change, in which team, and in what order.

This is based on a validated, peer-reviewed instrument from industrial sociology, deployed across the unit’s teams.

Interested? Get in touch.

Email us

Personnel turnover

Which teams are creating conditions that make people want to leave?

The risk

The moment a resignation letter lands on your desk is not the moment of the decision. It probably isn’t even a moment at all: it took shape over months, quietly, during exactly the meetings where nothing ever changed.

The countable cost of the resignation arrives first: the realistic estimate for replacing an employee runs between 90 to 200 percent of the position’s annual salary.1 The uncountable cost walks out the door in someone’s head: their knowledge of how the work actually flows, which step to skip, whom to call, what the system does on the last Friday of the quarter. You can re-hire the role. You cannot re-hire twelve years of knowing.

Of course everyone will tell you about the one event that started it all. But what matters are the prevailing conditions that determine whether that event leads to a resignation or passes without consequence. And departures rarely stay singular: each voluntary exit leads, on average, to further quits among similar employees.2 Given that the effect multiplies, fixing the conditions that produced the first departure is not optional.

Footnotes

  1. Allen, Bryant & Vardaman, 2010, Academy of Management Perspectives. ↩

  2. Sajjadiani, Kammeyer-Mueller & Benson, 2023, Academy of Management Journal. ↩

Have you seen this in your teams?

Whether you see it again depends on conditions that may still be in place.

Nobody resigns on the day they decide. The conditions are measurable while people are still weighing their options.

Then go by what you see. This is about conditions, not cases.

Change response

0 = Raised issues lead to visible change · 100 = Raising issues changes nothing

Knowledge redundancy

0 = The critical work would survive our most experienced person leaving · 100 = The critical work would stop if our most experienced person left

Exit learning

0 = When someone left, the conditions they left over were addressed · 100 = When someone left, the conditions they left over were only acknowledged

Your answers never leave this page. They are just stored in the browser session for your convenience.

What you see

The risk situation looks unremarkable.

By your read, your teams work under conditions that give this risk little to work with.

The risk situation looks elevated.

By your read, nothing here is really critical. Nothing is really fine either.

The risk situation looks critical.

By your read, one condition is strongly pronounced. The others do not compensate for it.

The risk situation looks serious.

By your read, several conditions are at the critical end: . That is the combination that gets expensive.

Where raising issues changes nothing, leaving becomes the last lever that works.

The risk isn't the departure. It's what the departure takes with it.

Conditions acknowledged are not conditions changed.

A read is a starting point, not a finding. What stays open is which teams are affected, how strong the risk is, and whether it holds at all. That is what we measure.

What we do

We measure departure conditions per team – workload, trust, predictability, whether raising issues leads anywhere – plus a knowledge-concentration read: where knowledge would leave with a person instead of staying with the organization.

You receive measurements for every team in the unit, never for a single person, and recommendations that follow from them: what to change, in which team, and in what order.

This is based on a validated, peer-reviewed instrument from industrial sociology, deployed across the unit’s teams.

Interested? Get in touch.

Email us

Bad news delay

Can bad news reach you in time?

The risk

The project was green in March, green in April, green in May, and catastrophic in June. Nothing changed in June except the truth’s arrival. Every operational problem carries two prices: the fix itself, and the delay premium, which compounds for every day between the problem existing and the problem becoming known. The delay is not exotic. When researchers examined why issues stay hidden, 85 percent of study participants recalled that they felt unable to raise an important issue with a supervisor.1 Where the report is mandatory, the silence changes form: ask project managers how often a status report gets optimistically shaded before it goes upward and they put it at around four in ten.2

Where critical conversations move slowly, a premium is paid on every open issue. A compounding debt, in no budget, growing daily.

Footnotes

  1. Milliken, Morrison & Hewlin, 2003, Journal of Management Studies. ↩

  2. Snow, Keil & Wallace, 2007, Information & Management. ↩

Have you seen this in your teams?

Whether you see it again depends on conditions that may still be in place.

Right now a piece of news may be sitting with someone still working out how to say it. Do you see the conditions for that?

Then go by what you see. This is about conditions, not cases.

Messenger outcome

0 = The last person who brought bad news was thanked for it · 100 = The last person who brought bad news suffered for it

Surprise factor

0 = Problems reach decision level while still cheap · 100 = Problems arrive as surprises

Packaging

0 = Bad news travels upward unsoftened · 100 = Bad news needs wrapping

Your answers never leave this page. They are just stored in the browser session for your convenience.

What you see

The risk situation looks unremarkable.

By your read, your teams work under conditions that give this risk little to work with.

The risk situation looks elevated.

By your read, nothing here is really critical. Nothing is really fine either.

The risk situation looks critical.

By your read, one condition is strongly pronounced. The others do not compensate for it.

The risk situation looks serious.

By your read, several conditions are at the critical end: . That is the combination that gets expensive.

Teams watch what happens to messengers first, then decide what reaches you.

A surprise is rarely new. It's news that waited.

News that needs wrapping travels slowly. The wrapping time is the premium.

A read is a starting point, not a finding. What stays open is which teams are affected, how strong the risk is, and whether it holds at all. That is what we measure.

What we do

We measure the discussion environment per team – vertical and horizontal trust, predictability – and where escalation paths exist on paper but die in practice.

You receive measurements for every team in the unit, never for a single person, and recommendations that follow from them: what to change, in which team, and in what order.

This is based on a validated, peer-reviewed instrument from industrial sociology, deployed across the unit’s teams.

Interested? Get in touch.

Email us

Cross-unit friction

Where do handovers create friction?

The risk

On the diagram, a handoff is a box, an arrow, and another box. The arrow is doing a lot of quiet work: it assumes the receiving team trusts what arrives, and that the sending team cares what happens next.

The most perfect handover structure is still executed by two teams with their own standards, trust levels, and history with each other. Vindictive or insecure behavior at a boundary does not break the process, but slows it, permanently.

Relationship conflict shows strong and negative correlations with team performance, and the damage is greater in complex work than in routine work.1 The friction tax is highest exactly where the value is created.

The workflow you built for speed runs at the speed of the relationship.

Footnotes

  1. De Dreu & Weingart, 2003, Journal of Applied Psychology. ↩

Have you seen this in your teams?

Whether you see it again depends on conditions that may still be in place.

A clean diagram between two wary teams is still a wary handoff. The friction shows up as rework long before anyone calls it a conflict.

Then go by what you see. This is about conditions, not cases.

Failure response

0 = A failed handoff triggers a joint fix · 100 = A failed handoff opens a case file

First-time usability

0 = Work crossing the boundary arrives usable · 100 = Work crossing the boundary needs rework and clarification loops

Escalation dependency

0 = Cross-unit issues resolve at the working level · 100 = Issues only resolve when management is summoned

Your answers never leave this page. They are just stored in the browser session for your convenience.

What you see

The risk situation looks unremarkable.

By your read, your teams work under conditions that give this risk little to work with.

The risk situation looks elevated.

By your read, nothing here is really critical. Nothing is really fine either.

The risk situation looks critical.

By your read, one condition is strongly pronounced. The others do not compensate for it.

The risk situation looks serious.

By your read, several conditions are at the critical end: . That is the combination that gets expensive.

Case files don't fix handoffs. They document them.

Rework at the boundary is the friction, made visible and countable.

If resolution requires summoning management, the process has a bottleneck with a calendar.

A read is a starting point, not a finding. What stays open is which teams are affected, how strong the risk is, and whether it holds at all. That is what we measure.

What we do

We measure the cultural profiles of the teams on both sides of the boundary, compared – where working styles diverge, and what the divergence does to the handoff.

You receive measurements for every team in the unit, never for a single person, and recommendations that follow from them: what to change, in which team, and in what order.

This is based on a validated, peer-reviewed instrument from industrial sociology, deployed across the unit’s teams.

Interested? Get in touch.

Email us