Over the years, environmental and financial performance have become increasingly intertwined thanks to the rapid rise of ESG investment. As such, it’s more important than ever for your EHS team to laser focus on the collection, tracking, and reporting to lower compliance and business risks across the board.
Keeping up with the constant regulatory changes and proactively identifying issues before they become a problem are two of the most prominent challenges organizations face when trying to meet these goals. In this blog, we’ll help show you how to create a culture of compliance, strategies to minimize risk (and the most common mistakes to avoid), and what to start thinking about now to prepare for your organization’s ESG reporting initiatives.
Best Practices for Reducing EHS Risk
Many organizations struggle when it comes to proactively identifying issues and challenges before they present themselves as risks. But knowing all the potential risks you might face allows you to allocate resources to those most likely to occur or would be the most costly for your organization. By leveraging EHS software, you’ll be able to create process automation, accountability, and insights into data and activities. Additionally, this investment will demonstrate your organization’s commitment to environmental stewardship and performance.
Common Mistakes When it Comes to Managing Environmental Risk
When evaluating compliance, many will look to the past to see where they’ve been successful or failed. But this only shows a part of the picture. Other common mistakes that lead to more significant EHS risks include:
- Not keeping up with changes (whether they be regulations, site conditions, documentation, or personnel)
- Assuming that a lack of incidents, violations, or fines means your organization is in compliance
- A general misunderstanding of how to assess, mitigate, and manage risk effectively
Recognizing these common mistakes in your daily operations is the first step toward better managing environmental risks and ensuring you’re in compliance.
Need help understanding EHS compliance and how software can help your organization? Get in touch with our experts today!
Keeping Up With the Changing Regulatory Landscape
Veteran EHS team members know all too well that the regulatory landscape is constantly changing, leaving them wondering how to plan for what they don’t yet know when it comes to compliance for things like site conditions, products, and materials. Though there isn’t a way to predict the future, there are steps you can take to mitigate the risk of non-compliance with unknown regulations:
- Conduct automated and routine inspections and audits, and regulatory applicability reviews so your site can be evaluated against regulatory requirements.
- Create a solid Management of Change process so that you can easily and properly evaluate risks and make the necessary changes from there. Ensure these changes can be assigned and tracked to completion and that you’re able to communicate when certain actions can’t go forward due to EHS compliance or risks.
- Leverage the knowledge and wisdom of EHS experts through concern and question reporting. These individuals can evaluate, correct, or approve activities, products, and conditions that could impact compliance.
- Automate workflows, digitize processes and implement stage-gates to make it easier to keep up and implement changes when they happen.
One key resource that can help with any of these steps is a strong, unified EHS platform, like CorityOne, which helps give you a holistic view of your entire program.
Creating a Compliance-Driven Culture
Making compliance part of your everyday culture is a great way to make this work more proactive than reactive. But given its complexities, getting buy-in for these tasks can sometimes be difficult if you aren’t fully immersed in this work all the time. An important practice is creating a clearly defined process for compliance, such as a digital, step-by-step inspection guidance checklist for employees to follow. This allows your employees to easily look up questions they might have and thus, make the right choices. Additionally, educating employees about the importance of compliance can help foster more buy-in by showing them why it matters.
Learn More About Managing Environmental Risk and Compliance
Managing environmental risk and compliance is tricky and aren’t skills you can learn overnight. But through diligent efforts, you can ensure you’re setting your organization up for success. Want to learn more about best practices and the ways technology can help make the job a little easier? Download our eBook: How to Reduce Environmental Risk and Create a Culture of Compliance today!
