Global Risk Management Survey 2015

Globalization offers tremendous potential in the form of international partnership, technological innovation, and business expansion for companies around the world. Increased connectivity and interrelation of countries and companies provides unprecedented opportunity for growth. Aon’s 2015 Global Risk Management Survey is designed to offer organizations the insights necessary to compete in this increasingly complex operating environment.

Conducted in the fourth quarter of 2014, the survey has gathered input from 1,418 respondents at public and private companies of all sizes around the world. The 2015 findings from the web-based survey have underscored that companies are grappling with new risks and that there are differences of opinion on how best to prioritize and respond to them.

For the first time since 2007, damage to brand and reputation has emerged as the top-ranked risk in our survey. Interestingly, cyber risk has entered the top 10 for the first time this year. The connection between these two risks has been felt around the world in 2014, as a rash of data breaches demonstrated the fragile nature of consumer trust in leading corporations. The interconnected nature of risk is underscored by two other risks in our top 10, the failure to attract and retain top talent and the failure to innovate. There is no question that organizations are under intense pressure to nurture the ingenuity and maximize the productivity of their people.

Companies that cannot appropriately align and incent their workforce will quickly lose ground to their competition.