Posts filed under ‘EHS Policy’
Meet the NAEM Board of Directors: What are the EHS and sustainability trends to watch in 2012?
As part of NAEM’s 2012 Member Appreciation Week celebration, we sat down with members of the NAEM Board of Directors to talk about the EHS and sustainability trends to watch in 2012. Featuring Michael Miller of Dean Foods; David Newman; Mark Hause of DuPont; and Verne Shortel of NRG Energy.
Meet the NAEM Board of Directors: What are some of the lessons you learned in 2011?
In honor of this week’s 2012 Member Appreciation Week celebration, we sat down with members of the NAEM Board of Directors to talk about trends in EHS and sustainability management. Featuring Deb Hammond of Abbott Laboratories; Stephen Evanoff of Danaher Corp.; Bruce Karas of The Coca-Cola Co.; and Minda Sarmiento of Shaw Environmental Inc.
Signs of a Strong EHS Culture
Stephen Evanoff
At this year’s NAEM Forum in Tucson, several speakers and participants made the point that a strong environment, health and safety (EHS) culture is a prerequisite to achieving and sustaining a high-level of EHS performance, and EHS managers are better served by focusing on building an EHS culture than focusing strictly on outcomes. Building a culture that values EHS is difficult and takes years, so it’s important to have a clear vision of what a strong EHS culture looks like. Here are my thoughts on the core characteristics of a strong EHS culture.
- Top management is involved and visibly supportive: Senior managers include EHS in enterprise goals, metrics, and operations reviews. They engage in safety-related activities, such as safety walks and self-audits, and set a clear and consistent tone through their actions that EHS is a core value.
- All levels of management are accountable: EHS comprises a significant portion of performance evaluations for managers and supervisors. Managers and supervisors are expected to create a safe work environment for their associates, and ensure the people under their supervision tend to their EHS responsibilities with the same rigor as they do quality, productivity and schedule.
- EHS is integrated into core business processes: The EHS program is made operational through the enterprise business management system and standard operating procedures. In enterprises where EHS is well-integrated, EHS doesn’t require special attention or management exhortations. It is simply how business is done.
- EHS is communicated effectively and frequently: EHS requirements are understood by all associates. New associates receive EHS training appropriate to their jobs as part of orientation. Management realizes that the importance of EHS must constantly be reinforced to achieve and maintain a high-level of performance.
- Doing the right thing is innate: Associates have a high-level of EHS awareness, receive sufficient and continuous EHS training and are given the tools to ensure effective EHS management. Associates do the right thing and do things right, even when nobody is watching.
- Associates are motivated: People find intrinsic value in high EHS performance. They understand its contribution to the success of the enterprise and take pride in doing their part.
What characteristics do you think are essential for a strong EHS culture?
What do you call your EMS?
Megan Lum
It’s cliché, I know, to say that change is constant. But it’s so true and I try to remind myself to remain open and flexible. At Pacific Gas & Electric, we continue to make significant changes to our business to better serve our customers. One of the changes we are currently trying to implement in our environmental organization is a re-imagining of our environmental management system (EMS) – leveraging the strengths of some elements, while boosting the effectiveness of others. We’re using a cross-functional team to work on this, including having frequent meetings with various stakeholders.
During one of those stakeholder meetings, we had a brainstorming session on “What do we do to ensure a successful, sustainable EMS?” The conversation was quite animated, and one comment struck me: “If you want this to be sustainable, don’t call it an EMS when you roll it out to people.”
This brought a lot of head nodding. If EMS was introduced as a grand new program, it may come across as yet another corporate initiative, which could be an impediment to making it a truly sustainable program.
I’ve seen success on both sides of that coin. I’ve implemented EMS programs where all the elements of an ISO 14001 program were present, but it wasn’t officially called an EMS. Everything was introduced as part of the environmental program, and employees incorporated environmental practices into work processes and job descriptions as part of the slowly changing culture. Everything was there, but it just didn’t have a specific name.
On the other hand, sometimes rolling out an EMS as a specific program can be a benefit – particularly if a company is working toward it as a stated goal. Having a goal of getting an EMS ISO 14001-certified can bring employees together, encourage teamwork, and drive culture change faster than a more subtle approach.
We’re still in the re-imagining process, so it will be interesting to see which path we choose.
What do you call your EMS?
Megan Lum, P.E. is the Manager for Shared Facilities and Environmental Operations, at Pacific Gas & Electric Co. In this capacity she is privileged to lead a team of about 30 professionals, who provide environmental compliance support for the company’s gas and electric distribution, fleet, materials management and real estate operations. She is a member of NAEM’s Board of Regents and will be participating in NAEM’s EHS Management Forum as a speaker in the Management of Change session.
Increasing EHS Value in Tough Economic Times
Mark Posson
Can we do more with less? Absolutely! This tough economy is affecting all aspects of an organization and environmental management is not immune. Today’s reality in most organizations is stagnant or declining resources and a continuing mandate to increase environmental performance. We need to resist the tendency to pull back in tough economic times and instead be introspective and improve the way we execute. We can free up the resources to meet the demands of expanding requirements by continually improving our business processes. The increased efficiency will free up resources and the increased effectiveness will boost performance and stakeholder value.
Strategically, what processes provide the greatest value to our stakeholders? Where can we get our biggest return for the time invested? These basic questions will help prioritize your improvement targets and possibly identify processes that can be eliminated. A ranked list of processes for improvement will guide your pace of change and tactical execution.
Tactically, the simplest path to improve a process is to follow the elements of lean:
- Identify the value to the stakeholder (your customers)
- Determine the sequence of activities (current process flow)
- Identify the activities that create value
- Eliminate activities that do not add value
- Identify process inefficiencies and their cause(s)
- Eliminate the cause(s) of inefficiencies
- Create the new process (future process flow)
- Implement the new process
- Measure results
The steps are simple but often challenging to implement in light of day-to-day execution pressures. We can’t expect different outcomes by following the same processes. The investment in process improvement will provide the payback in better results with fewer resources.
What strategies do you use to do more with less?
Mark Posson is the former Director of Environment, Safety and Health at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co. and the current Chair of the city of Pleasanton’s Energy and Environment Committee. He recently began offering consulting services to help organizations improve their environment, safety and health performance.
The Considerable Challege of Setting Goals
Bruce Klafter
Inside most companies it may seem at times that we are virtually awash in goals, targets, objectives, incentives and other means of spurring us to action. Like many things in life, “too much of a good thing” can be counterproductive, but there is no question carefully formulated goals are critical to environmental, health and safety (EHS), and sustainability programs. As the great philosopher Yogi Berra once stated: “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.”
On October 19 at the NAEM Forum, we are going to explore a number of questions related to goal setting, but principally the “how” of it.
What makes setting an enterprise wide sustainability goal a tricky proposition? Here are some of the factors I believe come into play:
- A good deal of data is required and in many cases our data is missing, incomplete or lagging;
- Benchmarks are important, but can be misleading because no two companies are situated in exactly the same place;
- Multi-year goals are usually advisable, but the longer the duration of the challenge, the greater the uncertainty that creeps in. How many of us accounted for a global recession in 2009?
- Top-level participation is essential, but a certain amount of background is necessary and time and attention are hard to come by;
- How ambitious does your company wish to be, i.e. how far should the goals be stretched or how much risk of failure will be tolerated?
- How do the goals relate to overall company strategy or do you have the right people in the room to set the goals?
- What will it cost to attain the goals (a near certain question from your friendly CFO)?
Please add your questions to the mix and we will answer them all at the Forum (at least that’s my goal!)
Bruce Klafter is Managing Director for Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) at Applied Materials, Inc., where he also heads Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability. He will be speaking during the “Sustainability: Defining your Program, Setting the right Goals” session as part of NAEM’s EHS Management Forum on Oct. 19-20 in Tucson.
Dow Chemical Co.’s Strategy for Addressing Product Stewardship Issues
With the growth in product stewardship regulations in Europe and beyond, chemical makers are facing unprecedented demand for transparency. In this video at our recent EHS Compliance Excellence Conference, Connie Deford, Director of U.S. Chemical Management Policy for Dow Chemical Co., discusses the impact these regulations are having and how the company is addressing them.
