Eliminating EHS Silos: How To Make Environmental Compliance A Company-Wide Effort

Innovation Eliminating EHS Silos: How To Make Environmental Compliance A Company-Wide Effort Luke Jacobs Forbes Councils Member Forbes Technology Council COUNCIL POST Expertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based) Oct 17, 2022, 07:30am EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Luke Jacobs is the CEO and cofounder of Encamp , an environmental compliance data management and reporting platform.

getty Environment, health and safety (EHS) teams face increasingly complex challenges like ever-changing regulations, detailed reporting requirements and decentralized data. Compliance data and reporting often require a higher level of accuracy that traditional and manual practices don’t always provide. Because stakeholders outside of the EHS teams are usually part of the compliance process, the chances of human error are simply too high.

These challenges can be daunting for EHS teams, let alone just a single person. Instead, they require enterprise-wide collaboration. For these reasons, many leading organizations are adapting to the digital economy to overcome the challenges.

A PTC survey found that the top benefit of digital transformation cited by executives was improved operational efficiency. Being able to streamline and engage with stakeholders during the compliance process can lead to more informed decisions and successful reporting outcomes. When preparing and submitting environmental compliance reports, streamlined collaboration should encompass communication, data sharing, assigning and tracking tasks and eliminating institutional knowledge silos.

Stakeholder engagement has become a key strategy in not only implementing digital transformation but achieving accurate and successful compliance reporting outcomes as well. These three stakeholders, in particular, can influence the success of the environmental compliance process. MORE FOR YOU Hiring Refugees: How One Big Factory Did It Apple Confirms More Problems For iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Pro Buyers What Gen-Z Needs To Learn About Leadership To Build A Better World • Site leaders.

Individual site leaders are the most crucial drivers of facility EHS compliance outside of the EHS team. Even a knowledgeable and motivated EHS team can’t achieve most compliance improvements without site leadership support. Site leaders not only need to follow EHS compliance initiatives proposed by the EHS team, but they need to champion these efforts with their staff.

This support includes ensuring employees receive and attend appropriate EHS training and follow EHS compliance initiatives and rules. In general, site managers are more focused on site operations and safety than environmental. However, in a highly regulated industry, a site manager must understand the site’s environmental liabilities.

For example, a site with a Title V air permit, a wastewater discharge permit and large hazardous waste generation capabilities has many regulatory requirements. Keeping air emissions and water discharges within allowable limits impacts operations. In a perfect world, site leaders work with the EHS team to increase knowledge sharing and data visibility, which helps with reporting and keeps facility operations compliant.

To streamline the data collection process, especially for site leaders managing several facilities in different states, centralizing data into one location can be a good starting foundation. EHS teams can make the compliance process more efficient for site leaders by taking facility, contact and product inventory data and converting it into a digital format for easier data input. Centralizing that data across all facilities can make it simpler to gather and validate quickly at scale.

More importantly, moving away from manual spreadsheets can enhance the user experience and minimize human error as well as help organizations manage gaps that can be left by site leadership turnover. • Department managers. Department managers’ EHS-related duties change depending on the employees they oversee.

For example, shipping and receiving department managers monitor employees who must follow Department of Transportation regulations for shipping hazardous materials (like corrosives or flammables) or hazardous waste. Managers and employees working in manufacturing departments may be responsible for satellite accumulation areas or properly labeling hazardous wastes. Sites with air and water permits may also have batch limits and record-keeping requirements for certain production lines.

That means department managers must train production employees to record all batch numbers and time runs, and they must oversee these employees as they do it. They also oversee the operation of monitoring equipment associated with the production lines and ensure the recording of data such as temperature readings and pressure drops. This data is critical to remaining in compliance with permits and may be requested by the regulating agency.

One of the most significant challenges that many EHS teams face is knowledge or information silos. More often than not, resource-constrained teams are composed of only one or two individuals holding the most knowledge about compliance and reporting. Outside of the core compliance team, various departments within the industry also experience the effects of a high turnover environment.

By keeping vital compliance information contained to only a few people, department managers run the risk of misplaced data and reporting inaccuracies. To avoid information silos and keep operations moving smoothly, it’s important for department managers to move information away from living within multiple sources and centralize it into a single source of truth. By containing compliance data and knowledge in one central location, department supervisors can ensure that stakeholders have access to the right information they need.

• Executive-level personnel. On the executive level, leaders carry the responsibility of signing off on environmental permits, reports and other documents. Many executives want a solid understanding of everything they sign and why it is required, while others may sign anything put in front of them without question.

Ideally, executives should want to be involved in the environmental compliance process and collaborate with EHS teams. In addition to monetary fines for the organization, being a responsible official for a company or site carries personal liability, with the potential for criminal charges if the organization is noncompliant. For business leaders, setting a clear and strategic vision makes the biggest impact when it comes to accelerating organizations to a new level of compliance efficiency.

Whether it’s building strategies toward technology, compliance or even sustainability, stakeholder engagement is always critical when introducing new initiatives to the workforce. Although it may be a time-consuming step, including any input from your stakeholders is a great foundation for future buy-in and trust. Have crucial stakeholders ask questions, provide feedback and be part of a pilot program.

Executive-level personnel is the driving force toward ensuring company-wide engagement and success by making sure goals are being communicated to each stakeholder. Most employers agree that collaboration is critical to the success of a business. A cross-functional approach must be encouraged by leadership, accepted and practiced by employees and continually nurtured.

Shared responsibility among EHS professionals and other stakeholders can lead to compliance confidence. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify? Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn .

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