6 best practices for EHS assessments

What is an EHS assessment?

In contrast to corporate-wide environmental, health and safety (EHS) auditing programs, an EHS assessment is an internal audit focusing solely on an individual facility. Through thorough risk assessments, this audit measures EHS performance, namely within environmental hazards, occupational health, and occupational safety to gain insight into the business’ EHS management, EHS compliance status, and EHS performance.

Generally, facilities conduct these evaluations on their own to provide a snapshot of the current compliance status of that site and further EHS insight to facilitate an effective EHS program. For an organization with multiple sites, routinely conducting EHS assessments across all its facilities enhances its ability to systematically monitor compliance levels and enable continued improvement of its EHS risk management.

Maintaining a regular EHS assessment program is fundamental for companies’ ongoing evaluation, and continuous improvement, of their EHS management systems. Yet, whether a business will reap these benefits depends on the self-audit’s structure and strategy. Unfortunately, many misguided tendencies trample the chances of an effective appraisal before it even begins.

Here are six best practices from Enhesa’s Senior Expert Support Manager, Elaine Ye, on optimizing EHS assessments for the most effective insights and results to elevate your company’s EHS compliance.

1. Align your actions with top-level goals

Setting a clear objective and EHS initiatives before planning out any details is crucial to a successful EHS assessment. For facilities that involve various types of operations, these evaluations are too often too broad and, therefore, too overwhelming to effectively complete.

On the other side of the spectrum, for single-operation sites, there might be a specific, urgent EHS risk to assess that a wide-ranging evaluation only skims over. Aligning with overarching goals and limiting the scope of the EHS assessment helps to not only make the process more achievable, but also offer more actionable results and EHS insight.

To fully maximize the benefit of your EHS assessment, ensure that the objective is directly tied to an existing overarching EHS compliance goal — whether for that facility or enterprise-wide. For instance, you might use the process to highlight the strength of the current compliance programs or risk management software, or locate areas that require additional resources for the next stage of the organization’s compliance strategy. Through this alignment, the EHS assessment can serve as an integral part of corporate-wide compliance monitoring, helping to plan corporate resources based on findings or evaluate the management system for ISO or other certification purposes.

2. Limit the scope of the assessment

Another way to optimize results from your EHS assessment is to narrow down the scope to target risk exposure of a facility’s manufacturing activities, such as the hazard and effect management process, instead of covering the entire spectrum of applicable EHS issues.

Similarly, you can also structure your EHS assessment to focus only on a specific area of operation, such as hazardous material storage areas and their related EHS concerns or EHS regulation.

Regardless of what you determine the priority, the better defined your EHS goal, the more likely you are to obtain findings that help you achieve it.

3. Pick the right people to participate

The type of information you want to get out of your EHS assessment is just as important as the team you choose to be involved in it.

To determine the appropriate objective and accurately assess compliance against it, a facility needs to fully understand the activities that are frequently carried out at the sites. This includes any complex technological machinery being used at the plants. It’s crucial to know the exact details of the plants’ activities, especially for facilities that are newly built or have been recently expanded or renovated.

Even if your facility had a full-spectrum assessment in previous years, it’s likely to have new and/or additional operation units or machinery that could significantly change your compliance obligations and EHS performance.

As you select the team to lead and carry out the assessment, make sure to include the following staff and experts:

• EHS personnel and staff
• People familiar with facility operations, such as plant supervisors or managers, and operation line management personnel
• Technical specialists or safety engineers familiar with the operation and its tools and systems
• External experts or consultancies, when possible, to facilitate the process based on their specific expertise and to give an essential outside perspective

When you form an EHS assessment team with these key participants, you ensure that it is fully equipped with the necessary site knowledge and experience, technical expertise and objectivity to offer clear, accurate and leverageable results.

4. Plan a reasonable schedule

As necessary as it is, an EHS assessment isn’t the only thing your team needs to do. This type of audit should be an efficient evaluation, not a prolonged process that disrupts normal operations. As such, you should create a plan for your process that fits within a manageable timeframe and ensure that it corresponds with other responsibilities, such as training, operational efficiency, and safety performance.

When it comes to timing, compliance obligations come first. This means that each facility needs to plan EHS assessments around upcoming mandatory audit or inspection requirements. Ideally, your facility would complete the EHS assessment prior to the regular mandatory audit. This way, the resulting findings can serve as a ‘fire drill’, identifying changes to make before the official audit. In terms of prioritizing plants, choose to first evaluate sites that involve high-risk exposure or environmental impact before those with less urgent compliance considerations.

In terms of a timeframe, break it down for better results. Even with a targeted focus for your EHS assessment, if your objective requires covering multiple aspects or EHS risks and/or involves many site EHS personnel and technical experts, separate it into several smaller, streamlined evaluations. For instance, a facility can divide the appraisal into different scopes which can be assigned to the relevant EHS personnel and technical experts to evaluate.

5. Save time by gathering information first

You’ve targeted your objective, assembled your team and carefully planned your timeframe — but it’s not time to hit the trigger just yet. Achieve an efficient EHS assessment with a solution to speed up the initial review stage.

Depending on your facility’s scope of operations and identified goal, the assessment process may require review of voluminous records and documents. To save time and cut costs, you can leverage a digital regulatory intelligence tool to help you pre-emptively gather essential information and build a solid foundation before the EHS assessment begins.

6. Take action after the EHS assessment

No matter how seamlessly you perform a EHS assessment, your business won’t make progress until you leverage what you’ve learned. These types of evaluations provide key insights that identify both positive progress and weaknesses in a facility’s EHS compliance and risk management.

While EHS assessment findings indicate areas of improvement for individual facilities, they also highlight the strengths and accomplishments achieved under the current compliance management system. EHS leadership may highlight persistent and corporate-wide issues across various sites, as they indicate high-risk areas and potential gaps in the current compliance program.

Whatever the conclusion, for both local and top-level findings, it’s critical that leadership uses these results to properly plan resources and tackle issues to avoid potential consequences of non-compliance.

Benefiting your business beyond the current compliance snapshot

Without the right structure and strategy, EHS assessments can produce more wasted effort than worthwhile findings. To be truly effective, this type of appraisal shouldn’t be merely a glance in the mirror, measuring a facility against its existing EHS compliance checklist. Instead, when completed and consulted correctly, these evaluations reflect the progress of ongoing compliance management, helping to maximize EHS compliance efforts and resources across your organization for continued progress.

By following the best practices outlined above, you can overcome the challenges blocking your company from a better view of its compliance management today — and leverage more actionable insights for maintaining it in the future.