Talking about Risk
By Ed Rutkowski
The industrial hygiene profession revolves around hazards. IH is nearly universally defined as the anticipation, recognition, evaluation, and control of hazards, plus the confirmation of those controls (ARECC). But another essential part of an IH’s job, communication with workers and management, isn’t covered by ARECC. And according to George Gruetzmacher, when IHs talk with these audiences, focusing on hazards can be misleading.
An industrial hygiene engineer with the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene, Gruetzmacher has 40 years’ experience with the OSHA consultation program, helping small businesses address OEHS issues. During an educational session on May 20 at AIHA Connect 2025 in Kansas City, Gruetzmacher acknowledged that what he called the “hazard approach” is the dominant paradigm of IH work. Nearly all practitioners are taught that the first thing they need to do is identify hazards, followed by measuring levels and implementing controls. But what they’re really doing, Gruetzmacher said, is evaluating risk.
“I’m going to argue that an IH’s prime function is to give a professional opinion on risk,” Gruetzmacher said.
A focus on risk has several advantages, not least because the concept of risk is familiar to the business community. While IHs are used to expressing risk mathematically, Gruetzmacher recommended that they adopt more common terms when discussing risk with other audiences. “We’ve got to embrace the fact that [risk] is not a number,” Gruetzmacher said. Characterizing risk as either acceptable, tolerable, or unacceptable is a way to convey the essential truth that “risk is not a bright line.”
The idea of tolerable risk—“the risks people will take, but they’re not happy about it,” Gruetzmacher explained—applies to most occupational contexts. His conversations with employees generally involve determining the line that divides tolerable from unacceptable risk. He advocated using tools like a basic risk matrix, which plots risks on a grid according to the severity and magnitude of a given exposure, as aids for communicating risks to workers and management. “This is a much easier way to communicate why you’re doing things,” he said.
Similarly, he urged OEHS professionals to embrace the language of risk modification when discussing workplace issues. A confined space, for example, is not a hazard; it is a condition that increases the risk of the hazards that are present. Controls, too, can be described in terms of risk modification: adding ventilation to a confined space lowers the risk. Depending on the situation, other risk modifiers can include non-routine work, weather, workload, and unexpected events.
Talking about risk, Gruetzmacher said, is a more effective way to achieve buy-in from workers and management for OEHS interventions. “My mission, my job, is to help people live long, productive lives while they’re working, and to live long, productive lives in retirement,” he said. “And to do that, we have to reduce the risk.”
Ed Rutkowski is editor in chief of The Synergist.
