Posts filed under ‘EHS Management’
Using Change to Drive EHS Improvement
Stephen Evanoff
In a business, change presents an opportunity to eliminate environment, health and safety (EHS) risks, and learning how to initiate and drive necessary change is an important skill for EHS leaders to cultivate.
Here are a few observations on how to reduce EHS risks by taking advantage of change:
- Identify the relevant opportunities: One of the key challenges is to explain which opportunities merit your involvement and why. While this may seem obvious to you, it may not be to your leadership or to the project managers who are under pressure to deliver results on schedule, under budget. There are the big opportunities such as a facility move, consolidation, or expansion, and new or modified equipment. These offer excellent opportunities to implement fire protection systems, machine guarding, electrical safety devices and ergonomic principles. New or reformulated chemicals or materials and changes in chemical use offer a more subtle opportunity to reduce EHS risk by substitution, improved control and more efficient use. New product introduction can be an opportunity to address long-term, regulatory-driven challenges such the European Union Restriction on Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive or the Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment (WEEE) directive. New customers, contracts and suppliers may be game-changers where EHS requirements are concerned.
Business leaders need to understand the EHS risks and opportunities that come with these new relationships. - Get a seat at the table during the initial planning phase: This requires networking upfront with key process leaders as well as infusing EHS into the policies and procedures of the engineering, manufacturing and procurement departments. It also means engaging in strategic planning and product development processes. These relationship-building investments will pay dividends in the long-term. I have experienced missed opportunities due to lack of upfront involvement, such as failing to conduct a Phase I ESA prior to leasing a manufacturing facility and not specifying fireproof ceiling materials when renovating a building. Typically, trade-offs in material and equipment selection and capital investments are much more palatable when considered as part of a change.
- Make the business case in broad, but tangible terms: When conducting the traditional return on investment analysis that we are all familiar with, consider the financial benefits of EHS- driven investments that improve quality, improve productivity (e.g., more efficient material flow, reduced labor, and shorter cycle time associated with ergonomic improvements), reduce insurance premiums and avoid the cost of regulatory compliance administrative tasks (e.g., regulatory reviews, operating permits, and compliance training). Lastly, customer and employee satisfaction and retention are highly persuasive aspects of making a business case, if you can do it in credible, concrete terms.
- Reinforce the value of your involvement by measuring and reporting results: This is often forgotten in the swirl of the work day and the pressure to move on to new challenges. Once the change has been made and you are operating at steady state, do the analysis and demonstrate that the change has delivered what was promised. It will make people more receptive to your input the next time a change is contemplated.
What advice do you have for ensuring EHS is included in the management of change process? What lessons and success stories can you share?
Stephen Evanoff is Vice President of Environment, Health and Safety for Danaher Corp., a Fortune 250 global science and technology company. To learn more about the habits of effective change agents, tune in for NAEM’s Emerging Leaders webinar on “Strategic Influencing: How to Drive and Manage Change” on Sept. 20.
Aligning Environmental Metrics with Business Performance
Howard Brown
I have been working in the field of integrating business and environmental management since 1980. The growing community of people working in this field has made great progress in recent years. Environmental managers have, for example:
● Developed better techniques and software for tracking, managing, and reporting waste and emissions
● Incorporated waste reduction and recycling into vast numbers of industrial processes and business operations
● Demonstrated to investors that successful companies are the ones with good environmental performance commitments and records (and vice versa)
● Demonstrated to management that good environmental practices can reduce risk and costs
● Proven that companies can protect their brand and asset value through good, documented environmental performance and transparency
● Garnered the attention of investors and CEOs regarding these issues.
In spite of all of this progress, environment and business are still viewed as separate topics with separate (albeit more closely related) goals. The actual intersection at which good environmental and business practices become one – the point at which they become truly aligned – has eluded us.
As I have argued in previous Green Tie posts, I am now convinced that the ultimate key to aligning business and environment is managing resources, not just waste and emissions. Many of you have heard me say, “The more you use, the more you lose, no matter how good you are at managing what you are losing.”
As companies grow and use more, they generally waste more. I’m not just talking about waste as it is typically defined, as a byproduct of industrial processes (what’s hauled away or dispersed as air and water emissions). The definition of waste has to be expanded to mean the use of any resources that aren’t essential to delivering benefits to customers. By this definition, most of what goes into delivering our products and services is waste. But even if we accept that resource use is a decent proxy for environmental performance, what about business performance?
To get alignment you have to step back and look at the whole. Access to key resources will be the critical issue for business in the coming decades. Every nation and every business will be jockeying to secure supplies of the lowest-cost resources to meet their needs. In fact, the game of resource management and competition is already well underway. We are quickly reaching the point at which maneuvering with supplier contracts, influencing national economic policy, and other such techniques will not do the trick.
Finding truly innovative ways to deliver more value – to deliver more benefits to customers with less resources – will increasingly become the basis for controlling costs, reducing risks, pleasing investors, differentiating products and services in the marketplace, and gaining competitive advantage. This is the direction in which companies will focus innovation, as well as the method they will use to most effectively reduce environmental impacts.
Howard Brown is co-founder of dMASS, Inc. and a co-author of the new book “Naked Value: Six Things Every Business Leader Needs to Know About Resources, Innovation & Competition“.
Does your crisis communications plan involve social media?
Sandy Nessing
The power of social media recently became crystal clear following a couple of major events that captured much of the nation’s attention. When the lights went out June 29 for millions of electric customers in the wake of a super “derecho” that hit the Midwest and East Coast, many turned to their mobile devices for information and to make contact with the outside world. The companies whose infrastructure was damaged or destroyed by the severe weather relied on social media to provide updates of restoration efforts, safety information such as what to do if you encountered a downed power line, how to report an outage and to engage with customers who were very frustrated about being without power in triple digit heat.
More than 1.4 million American Electric Power (AEP) customers in six states lost power following a series of storms that began that day — and that was just one company. To try and satisfy customers’ hunger for information, AEP burned up the Twittersphere with regular updates almost around-the-clock, and posted videos and photos to its web sites and to company YouTube, Facebook and Flickr pages. We were able to answer customers’ questions in real time and give them information about restoration times and tips to survive the heat with no power.
As one would imagine, there was plenty of frustration over the duration of the outages. But when customers realized how bad the damage was, many began to understand why it was taking so long to turn the lights back on. As the work progressed, customers increasingly took to the airwaves to thank our crews and express appreciation for the information they got via social media. AEP received thousands more followers and significantly increased traffic to all of its web sites, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and YouTube videos. It became a life line for many and allowed us to interact directly with our customers during a major crisis.
Not long after that event, the horrible mass murders in Aurora, Colorado occurred. Amid the grief, shock and anger over those senseless shootings, something else interesting happened. Reporters in the field were getting updates from law enforcement officials via Twitter – and sharing news as the story unfolded, in real time, without waiting for periodic briefings. As a news junkie, it met my insatiable need to know what was happening as it happened. That’s when it became clear as day: Social media are critical during a crisis. It is vital to the flow of information and is an invaluable communications vehicle; one might even say it has become as important in a crisis as a business continuity plan. When crisis strikes, will you be ready with a social media strategy?
Sandy Nessing is the Director of Sustainability & ESH Strategy & Design for American Electric Power Co. Inc. She wrote and published AEP’s first Corporate Sustainability Report in 2007 and in 2010 published AEP’s first integrated Corporate Accountability Report, a combination of the annual sustainability report and Annual Report to Shareholders. Follow her on Twitter at @Watts4U.
EHS Success at the Intersection of Engagement and Coordination
Brad Waldron
When I first decided to take my current position with Caesars Entertainment Corp., I was concerned about the prospect of managing more than 40 properties across a dozen states and at least twice as many regulatory agencies.
In the absence of on-site staff exclusively dedicated to environmental affairs, I thought it would be difficult to educate and motivate employees. But the first couple of weeks brought a great discovery – the employees were already educated and motivated. The property-level employees who carry environmental compliance responsibility at Caesars are among the most dedicated I have ever met. The engineering staffs at the properties are truly interested in being successful and doing the right thing. Even if they can’t cite the regulatory reference, they are familiar with work practice standards and operating guidelines, which have enabled them to largely remain compliant.
Each property has developed its own environmental strategies to comply with the things that are relevant to them. Some of the larger properties have either relied on external consultants, or had a senior engineer on staff that happens to know something about it from a prior position. Sometimes it’s a relationship they have with a former colleague outside the company; many times it has been research and a desire to be compliant. But whatever the reason, they have found a way to accomplish what they need to.
I soon transitioned into a role focused on sharing more effective management strategies, consolidating record-keeping, streamlining inspections, opening communication channels, and ultimately, making environmental management feel more like a base requirement. In my past experience with heavy industrial sites, environmental compliance was a way of life for every position. Each employee had it engrained in them because of the vast number of requirements and experience with past penalties. Within the hospitality industry, we have significant and diverse requirements, and people are aware of them, but true success will only become possible through integrating roles into every job around the organization.
Once employees have a basic understanding and the desire to comply, the next step entails giving them the tools to be effective and showing them the methods to make those tools most efficient. Efforts are now being made to accomplish environmental tasks within everyday duties. Doing the right thing is often surprisingly easy, and making employees aware of how to reduce the company’s environmental footprint seems to increase everyone’s willingness to be involved.
Brad Waldron is Corporate Manager of Environmental Affairs for Caesars Entertainment Corp., where he manages efforts to maintain Caesars’ position as an environmental leader. He will talk about how he collects and tracks his programs’ metrics at NAEM’s EHS Compliance Excellence conference on Aug.1-2 in Chicago.
Aspiring Leaders Take Smart Risks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZmCNEFfAtM&list=UUVUkp0BUrdpiXhDnIVQLwWQ&index=1&feature=plcp
Amy Franko, Founder and CEO of Impact Instruction Group, shares her advice for the behaviors and attributes aspiring leaders should develop.
Leadership and Management: “It Takes Two”
Kelvin Roth
There has been a lot of discussion recently around the differences between leadership and management. In fact, NAEM presented a great webinar in May about this very topic. While these discussions often provide good insight, too often they belittle the role of managers and stress leadership above other attributes.
To me, the difference between leadership and management is definitional rather than philosophical. Things are managed; people need to be led. However, in order to be effective one must have both leadership and management skills.
Effective leaders inspire others to elevate their game — but they also understand the technical issues, leverage their specialized knowledge and utilize data correctly. As the great Canadian physician Thomas McCrae once noted, “More is missed by not looking than by not knowing.”
Too often these days, executives seem to be in a rush to label themselves as “leaders” rather than “managers.” I believe we are currently seeing a rash of instances in which a lack of management skills has done in prominent leaders. A recent example of this can be seen in The Wall Street Journal’s coverage of JPMorgan’s recent multi-billion dollar investment loss debacle:
“On April 30, associates who were gathered in a conference room handed [JPMorgan Chairman and CEO Jamie] Dimon summaries and analyses of the losses. But there were no details about the trades themselves. “I want to see the positions!” he barked, throwing down the papers, according to attendees. “Now! I want to see everything!”
When Mr. Dimon saw the numbers, these people say, he couldn’t breathe.”
This was a leader who forgot to manage until it was too late — and it resulted in the loss of billions of dollars.
Over the years, I have seen many EHS initiatives fail due to lack of leadership. But I’ve also seen just as many fail because they were poorly managed. While leadership and management are different skills, they are not mutually exclusive. Both must be present to be effective.
So the next time you see an article touting the importance of leadership over managerial skills, remember that the most effective executives and managers possess and use both. As the 1988 hit song by Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock reminds us, “It takes two to make a thing go right/It takes two to make it outta sight.”
Kelvin Roth is President of the NAEM Board of Directors and the Director of Environment, Health & Safety for AMCOL International Corp.
What’s the staffing and structure of your sustainability team?
Sandy Nessing
The slow (some would argue stalled) economic recovery has many companies again looking inward to find ways to do more with less. Staffing levels and work processes are among those areas being scrutinized to squeeze the maximum efficiency from the least amount of resources.
We’ve all been there. As a sustainability professional, I have seen this profession grow during the last six years from obscurity (even ridicule) to top level management. Like so many, I started as a solo act; today I have a team of three. But I was curious – what is the typical staffing level for sustainability at companies? If I had to make the case for a certain staffing level, what would that number be?
To get a lay of the land, I conducted an informal poll* of 15 companies – ten in the electric utility sector and five non-utilities. What I learned was that the numbers are all over the boards. Sustainability teams range in size from one person shops to teams in excess of two dozen. In the utility industry, the average is two to four-person teams with some as large as seven. The non-utility companies also varied widely but they tend to be somewhat larger and closer to the CEO than their utility corporate social responsibility (CSR) peers typically are.
Few have Chief Sustainability Officers – still a bit of a rarity – and everyone relies on people across their organizations to make it happen. I thought my informal poll would provide clarity, but the moral of this story is that it’s a numbers game that relies heavily on management’s commitment to sustainability. The higher the commitment, the closer you tend to be to the CEO but that doesn’t always mean you have the big teams. I don’t necessarily think I need a bigger team but at least my suspicion that we are doing quite a lot with fewer resources than some of our peers is an accurate assessment. I’m happy being in the middle of the average in our sector with my three-person team, thank you very much.
How is sustainability managed in your company and do you think there are sufficient resources to support it?
Sandy Nessing is the Director of Sustainability & ESH Strategy & Design for American Electric Power Co. Inc.. She wrote and published AEP’s first Corporate Sustainability Report in 2007 and in 2010 published AEP’s first integrated Corporate Accountability Report, a combination of the annual sustainability report and Annual Report to Shareholders. Follow her on Twitter at @Watts4U.
*This poll was not scientific in nature and asked five simple questions:
1. How many people are dedicated to sustainability?
2. How far removed are you from the CEO?
3. Do you publish a corporate sustainability report annually?
4. Do you have a dedicated sustainability web site?
5. In which part of the company is sustainability located?
The Art of Selling Environment, Health and Safety
Kelvin Roth
We are told that our education, particularly our technical skills, will prepare us to succeed in a career in environment, health and safety (EHS) management. So back when I was working on my degree in Environmental Engineering, I was taught how to design, build and run projects. I developed technical skills as well as project management skills. And while these elements are certainly important to every EHS manager, one critical component tends to be left out of our schooling: the art of selling and marketing.
We know that EHS programs don’t succeed without senior management support. The consequences of not having this support — insufficient budgets, lack of assistance from other functional areas, conflicting priorities and unnecessary obstacles — can be devastating. But to gain this support, you must know how to sell your program.
I’m not talking about the ability to make cold calls or engage in business development activities, of course — I’m talking about selling a project, idea or program.
Marketing means engaging the company in a targeted fashion. What has sold your program or idea to senior management will often not be the same set of benefits that convince your facility managers or operators. Your strategy needs to address all impacted “customers.”
Because selling and marketing are such critical components, it is important that you take the time during your program design process to plan how you will sell and market it. Put together an internal marketing plan that addresses the implementation strategy and the tactics you will use to promote that strategy. A good marketing plan is like a game plan: It serves as a guide for the actions you need to take, but also provides some flexibility to shift tactics to address any issues that may arise.
Here are a few tips for selling and marketing your EHS program that you should consider when developing your internal marketing plan. (And don’t be afraid to borrow ideas from your marketing people!)
- Understand your company: You need to know your company’s goals and how it makes money. Simply knowing its EHS issues is insufficient; you need to understand your company’s position in the market.
- Lead with your strength: Define the biggest or broadest benefit of your program and lead with that. Keep the message simple and consistent.
- Develop the program “brand”: All successful programs have a common language, look and feel, regardless of where they are implemented in the company. Develop talking points that provide a quick and easy summary of the program to keep everyone focused on the key goals.
- Identify your best customers: If you can identify and engage those who will gain the most from the new program, they can help you sell it. Listen to the “voice of the customer” (or voice of the employee) and use their words to engage them and get them excited about the new program.
- Know your competition: There will be other programs that will compete for time and money. You need to have a plan to address these challenges and convince detractors that they can also gain from your program.
What other strategies have you used to effectively introduce new EHS programs in your company?
Kelvin Roth is President of the NAEM Board of Directors and the Director of Environment, Health & Safety for AMCOL International Corp.
Employee Engagement Advice from ThyssenKrupp’s “Green Girl”
Sasha Bailey
Over the course of the last few years, I have acquired quite a few pseudonyms: the Green Girl, the Recycling Lady, Green Team Leader, Head of the Glee Club, the-hateful-woman-who-took-my-desktop-printer …you get the point. (By far my favorite is ‘head of the Glee Club’) But at the end of the day, when all the number crunching and reporting and return on investment talk is over, if your employees do not get on the bandwagon, all the corporate mandates in the world will not help you meet your sustainability targets.
As the official head of the Glee Club, I have come to recognize several truths regarding employee engagement:
- One: You have to meet people where they are. Basically it does no good to talk to an office manager like an engineer and an engineer like an office manager. Their priorities are different; thus, they hear messages differently.
- Two: Everyone likes contests. Everyone. No matter how much you are may think, “People at my company would never get involved”, I’m here to tell you they would. Amazingly, people (and by people, I mean full-grown adults) love pizza parties. (You – shaking your head – trust me. They do.)
- Three: People want to hear positive things and think happy thoughts. Skip the polar bears and water shortages. I don’t mean to sound callous, but you are going to help the bears much more by getting people involved in up-cycling candy wrappers as part of their office sustainability initiatives than not doing anything at all.
- Four: Lip service looks exactly like lip service. It is amazing how keen people are on detecting nonsense. If your managers and executives are not committed to employee engagement, why would the employees commit to it? A CEO in a T-shirt and jeans planting trees will take you further than 1,000 witty emails or polar bear pictures.
- Five: Put the “glee” in glee club. Don’t put someone in charge of your employee engagement initiatives unless they have personality! Information has to be engaging enough for someone to click the link or open the email.
To some, the above may sound like I am advocating silly contests with butterflies and wood nymphs, while ignoring the real issues. The fact is, I am capable of talking life cycle analysis and carbon footprints with the best of them. But in the last five years, I have learned that to get people to participate, you first have to get them interested. And to get their interest, you have to be someone they want to hear. You have to have a voice that does not judge or preach or tell them what to do, but rather a voice they start to trust* and actually enjoy hearing from.
*Little disclaimer: On average, I receive 7-10 emails a month from random employees tattling on coworkers for wasting paper, making green suggestions or just asking me advice on which brand of laundry detergent to use or where to take used batteries. The upside is that I also get dried mushrooms from an employee in Maine, photos of people’s gardens and every chain email out there about grandmothers remembering ‘before it was green’. I LIKE being trusted!
Sasha Bailey is the Strategic Communications Manager for ThyssenKrupp Elevator-Americans Operating Unit, where she is responsible for creating and implementing high level communications strategies for all business units within the Americas as well as acting as the press and media liaison.
The Most Important Weapon in the Sustainability Toolbox
Bruce Klafter
Pop Quiz: What is the most important skill sustainability professionals need to do their job?
An understanding of lifecycle analysis? The ability to calculate a greenhouse gas inventory? A command of climate science? Experience with kaizen, poke yoke and genchi genbetsu (all Japanese supply chain management concepts)?
In my humble opinion, the most important and oft-used tool is an optimistic outlook. The reason for this somewhat surprising conclusion is that sustainability managers are typically working to exert influence across an organization, which may mean working without authority or as I like to say “working without a net”.
In the job descriptions I’ve written for the sustainability family at my company, this trait is referred as “a positive attitude and passion for sustainability.” A number of organizations that have taken a more exhaustive and scholarly approach to identifying job skills have also singled out “passion”, “enthusiasm” and a “positive attitude” as a key skills or attributes for people working in this emerging field. For more information, you may refer to studies from the International Society of Sustainability Professionals, the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship and the Corporate Responsibility Officers Association.
When confronted with our colleagues’ protests that they lack the time, the resources, the bandwidth, or simply the interest to support a sustainability initiative, what is the best response?
My thesis is that a negative response (e.g. expressing disappointment, anger, exasperation) is never the right response. After all, if the sustainability team cannot maintain a belief that the initiative will happen eventually, then it is hard to expect your colleagues to form that belief. My experience has been that persistence and patience usually pay dividends at some point. Some of the projects I am currently working on took nearly three years to take hold, with a change in management and current events helping drive a greater sense of urgency. To my counterparts in NAEM and elsewhere – keep a smile and keep on plugging away!
Bruce Klafter is head of Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability at Applied Materials, Inc. and leads the effort to fulfill the Company’s commitment to sustainability in the design and implementation of business strategies and worldwide operations. He serves as the champion for Applied Materials’ green programs and manages a variety of reporting, employee engagement and other strategic projects aimed at enhancing the company’s global citizenship programs. Mr. Klafter additionally directed the Company’s Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) programs for several years and began his career at Applied Materials as its first EHS legal counsel.
