And of course, helping to mitigate behavioural risks will have a positive knock-on effect for an HR department. "A safety incident, for example, can have legal, financial, reputational and customer impact," says Eugene Burke, chief science officer at talent management and analytics company SHL. "It's a ripple effect, as any negative incident flows out to HR. It can result in disengaged staff or sudden higher levels of turnover or absenteeism. HR can't avoid risk, it's going to happen, and HR is already part of the risk equation. You might have the structures and regulation in place, but it all comes down to people, so HR has to be in the game. Risk people don't really know about the behaviours. HR needs to be the mentor."

According to KPMG's Payne, there's a trade-off to be done here between HR and risk, with HR offering its behavioural expertise in exchange for something else. "HR departments have to be more tactically savvy about working with colleagues in risk management as a way to get their issues discussed at the right level in the business," he explains. "Most risk functions, when they think about risk, they think: 'how can I get people in the business to be more risk-conscious?' They need to rely on HR to help them do it. There's a bit of bargaining and negotiation to be done between the two functions. And HR can take the lead. Tell risk: we can help make your workforce more risk-conscious, but we need help too. Ask to see the enterprise risk map. Most HR professionals will never have seen one before. Once seen, you can ask for help getting people issues on the map."

So, how does HR go about defining these people issues? Which ones should it be prioritising and fighting to get on the risk agenda? In Young's opinion, it all comes down to strategic workforce planning. "Strategic workforce planning is people-risk management," she says. "Talent challenges are front and centre. Simply not having the right talent, at the right price, at the right time, in the right place, is a huge risk. All the issues HR is concerned with on a day-to-day basis are potential sources of human capital risk. It's just a different way of framing the issue."

KPMG's Payne agrees, listing other issues such as succession planning, key-person dependency and potential future skills gaps as areas that HR needs to be getting discussed at board level as part of the risk conversation. While Francis lists his number-one concern as "an ethical breach", he also includes talent management and succession planning as part of his organisation's risk-management plan. "We are doing it to minimise risk," he reasons.

Young warns that HR needs to be careful not to let the business wrongly define what human capital risk is. "Yes, it is things like reputational risk and supply-chain risk, but don't let that define it," she says. "The language is much broader." Stavroula Leka, associate professor, Occupational Health Psychology at the University of Nottingham, who is doing research into behavioural risk and HR, agrees: "Is HR strategic enough in its approach to risk?" she asks. "A lot of the time, HR is only looking at the risks around behaviour, but if you look at everything that is people-risk related, it also includes things such as high staff turnover and absenteeism. People risk is very multifaceted. There are so many different elements."