With the increasing need to address Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) issues, organizations are faced with several options on how to proceed in developing their internal capabilities. Beyond their sustainability and CSR strategy, there are nuts-and-bolts issues to consider, such as who will lead the effort and how to build the team or department.
A common starting place is to tap the EHS department and their personnel. The logic behind this is solid, given how central EHS is to sustainability and CSR. While the EHS function and its personnel are a good starting point, sustainability/CSR quickly encompasses areas in the organization well beyond EHS.
The C-Suite must consider how it is going to identify and develop its people who lead and manage sustainability/CSR. In the case of EHS professionals, those competencies and skills go beyond their solid technical foundation. Read More
McKinsey & Company recently published findings from its February 2010 survey, 
It’s common knowledge that sustainability is a big deal. It is a multidimensional issue that impacts all sectors of society. Companies wrestle with how they are going to respond beyond the obvious of energy conservation and waste reduction, when sustainability begins to blur with corporate social responsibility (CSR).
“What gets measured, gets done” is a popular saying in performance improvement circles. There is more though. Yes, true as this is, measurement—and I’ll go a step further here and say auditing—is just part of the “gets done” piece. When crafted within a context of breakthrough performance, EHS auditing and the audit function in an EHS department can be a catalyst for accelerated performance improvement and EHS integration. EHS auditing is commonly viewed as a necessary evil or burden to satisfy regulatory and legal requirements. Within this context, the results are predictable. There is little if any enthusiasm; there is a struggle; and there can be challenges with inter-rater reliability.
With roots in regulatory compliance, it’s no wonder that EHS professionals are, at times, viewed as cops. However, there are numerous evolving concepts that impact EHS effectiveness well beyond regulatory compliance. Some of these include the use of EHS management systems and six-sigma; the way in which EHS audits are conducted and its findings used; the role EHS professionals can play when their context (you can also say “mental models”) shift from compliance-based (cop-on-the-beat) to one of advising and coaching.
Organizational culture is complex, and according to many experts, not well understood. EHS professionals often think about culture in terms of safety. Yet, while safety is clearly important, the topic of culture is all-encompassing.
There is increased activity on occupational health and safety (OHS) programs in OSHA under its new administration. The agency’s new director is addressing and improving the safety culture in companies. One vehicle to do this is addressing comprehensive OHS programs. There was activity in the mid- to late 1990s in this area with attempts to codify the highly regarded Voluntary Protection Program and elevate the status of OSHA’s 1989 Program Guidelines. These efforts morphed into attempts in federal OSHA to adopt a national Illness and Injury Prevention Program (IIPP) found in a handful of states, including California.
EHS Functions are often described in terms of levels of maturity. These can also be called stages of development, levels of development, and so on. It’s common to describe these levels or stages with numerical ranks, such as from 1 to 3 or 5, where level or stage 1 represents lowest level of maturity or development and the highest level represents a high degree of maturity.