Continual improvement is a term we hear a lot about in business these days. It is a notion that is central to management system approaches rooted in the quality and ISO arenas. As central as this concept has become, I find that organizations struggle with how to define it and then practice it.
Continual improvement may be defined and implemented in any number of ways. The basic notion is that the organization should seek ways to achieve ongoing improvement of EHS/S performance, both in terms of outputs and outcomes. The primary goal of continual improvement activities should be to reduce EHS/S impacts and eliminate worker injury and illness.
Continual improvement does not mean or imply a requirement to attain better-than-compliance conditions as measured against specification regulations or standards. While better-than-compliance conditions may be a goal of an organization, it is not a requirement of the definition of continual improvement suggested here.EHS/S management systems provide a robust way to continually improve your EHS/S performance. ANSI/AIHA Z10, an OHS management system, explicitly support continual improvement with its requirement to feed information from measurement activities (e.g., audits, investigations, etc.) back into the planning cycle. This section of Z10 (6.5) provides the feedback loop that is central to a systems approach. It is through this process that organizations can then work on improving their EHS/S structures and, in turn, performance.
Another aspect of EHS/S MSs that supports continual improvement is the management review activity. All of the major EHS/S management system have a management review element. It is through management review activities that an organization assesses its EHS/S management approach against the organization’s strategy and stakeholder expectations.
© Redinger EHS, Inc. (2010)