In an ideal world, ensuring workplace safety would be straightforward. However, the realities of today’s modern workplaces make it one of the first areas to be overlooked when things get busy. Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) managers face the ongoing challenge of championing workplace safety and ensuring compliance, all while juggling competing priorities.
What makes the role even more complex is that no two EHS manager roles look the same. In larger companies, you might have a dedicated EHS department with direct access to the C-suite. On the other hand, in smaller organisations or SMEs, safety responsibilities might fall to site managers or be an added responsibility for employees.
No matter your role or company size, whether you’re a dedicated EHS manager or balancing safety with other tasks, we’ve put together some valuable tips to help you enhance your effectiveness and authenticity in promoting a safer workplace.
1. Manage both upwards and downwards
As an EHS manager, a key part of your role is educating your team on the importance of safety management. But it doesn’t stop there – you’ll often need to persuade senior staff to allocate budget for EHS initiatives or actively uphold safety regulations themselves.
One effective approach is to hold regular, role-specific training sessions tailored to each department. While this more customised strategy requires extra effort, it tends to deliver better results, as the training directly relates to how employees will engage with safety policies or use your health and safety software.
After all, your goal is to ensure that the time and energy spent implementing new software pays off. To drive adoption both up and down the organisation, as an EHS manager, consider the following:
- How clearly are goals and expectations communicated?
- Are your colleagues truly engaged?
- What might lead them to stray from agreed system usage?
- How transparent is accountability?
Strong leadership at every level is essential to fostering a robust safety culture. That’s why it’s crucial to have EHS managers or safety champions positioned throughout the business, across various departments, and at different levels of seniority. This ensures that safety remains a shared priority company-wide.
2. Build a culture of safety excellence
So you’ve got the right leadership in place – but how do you go from just promoting compliance to creating a culture of care and commitment?
Well, as an EHS Manager, it’s your responsibility to set a visible example of what safety excellence looks like.
Frame health and safety as an organisational effort, and not as the sole undertaking of the EHS manager or team. And build out your own strategies accordingly.
If you’re a member of the C-Suite, and have no direct involvement with environmental, health, and safety policy, you can still set a good example by ensuring that safety considerations are factored into everything you do. Such as, when opening a new office, don’t only focus on marketing and hiring but on how you can adhere to and embed health and safety management.
This shift in thinking will cascade down and drive organisation-wide change.
3. Have a strong EHS framework in place
A culture of care can only work with the right EHS framework, so it’s important to establish this element early on.
In our recent webinar with DEKRA, we discussed how their safety ecosystem highlights the importance of enabling systems, sustaining systems, and authentic leadership all working together to create a culture of care.
Having a strong framework in place means that any software implementation or EHS change can be delivered consistently and incrementally.
Software systems should be heavily incorporated into your framework. They can automate processes, provide consistency, and reduce human error.
However, the software needs to actually be used by staff. Companies often spend a lot of time (and budget) creating systems and introducing software that seems like it will work but doesn’t translate well into the real working world.
That’s why it’s key for you as an EHS manager to introduce changes gradually so they can be thoroughly stress-tested.
4. Implement change incrementally
The business landscape (and policy) changes quickly and frequently. And as an EHS Manager, it can be tempting to act reactively and bring changes into your organisation as rapidly as possible.
However, at Vatix, our experience has shown that bringing change about incrementally can be a more effective strategy. Here’s why.
If you’re introducing a new enabling or sustaining system, getting staff buy-in is one of the most important things. Communicating changes well in advance and allowing your team to build confidence in using the software is likely to have a more positive impact on adoption and engagement.
Overhauling all systems at once can lead to staff becoming overwhelmed and neglecting the system completely. Instead, aim for quick wins and break implementation projects down into manageable milestones.
For example, start with an incident reporting tool and then introduce audit and risk assessment software once your team is comfortable. This also gives you space to test out the software provider and make sure that the safety management system is easily customisable – and will be able to scale with you as your business grows.Â
5. Understand the commercial advantage of EHS
Implementing EHS policies with the primary goal of strengthening your financial positioning is not an effective or authentic way to bring about sustainable change.
EHS policy needs to be led by a genuine desire to improve health and safety within an organisation.
That being said, a savvy EHS manager will recognise that a robust EHS strategy can also unlock valuable commercial advantages that can be leveraged as an organic byproduct.
A good example of this is when submitting bids. More and more emphasis is being put on EHS when companies are looking over bid submissions—particularly when competing for government contracts.
A reliable platform that’s used consistently throughout the business for reporting on incidents, audits, and risk assessments can provide a lot of useful evidence that can be easily transferred to your bids.
Although bid writing is not normally the domain of an EHS manager, understanding where your team can help support commercial growth helps prove how integral safety management can be to the organisation as a whole.
Arm yourself with the right tools to be an effective EHS manager
From bid writing to platform training, working with the right health and safety software provider can make all the tips shared above more manageable.
Whether you’re looking for incident reporting, audits, or inspections software, Vatix’s customisable workplace offers a suite of health and safety solutions that can help you to be a more effective EHS manager.
All of our solutions can be introduced to your team individually or collaboratively – giving you the flexibility to provide well-paced staff training, increase adoption, and bring about incremental change.
For more insights into how you can be an authentic EHS manager and build a culture of safety excellence, watch our webinar with DEKRA – Unlocking Safety Excellence: Systems and Leadership.
