Five expert lessons to move from compliance to commitment

For companies to truly stay on top of EHS compliance, it takes more than simply knowing what regulations they need to adhere to. Those requirements are continuously shifting and evolving with the regulatory landscape, meaning businesses must go beyond compliance to stay ahead. This involves reshaping the company-wide culture to be one that holds itself to a higher standard when it comes to health and safety — a task that’s much easier said than done. The overall goal that organizations should be working towards, according to expert guest speakers in our webinar From compliance to commitment: Prerequisites for a safety culture, is to embark on a journey toward a more mature health and safety mindset.

Whether you’re currently reactive, dependent, or independent, it’s vital to be honest about where your organization currently sits on the culture curve and advancing in a way that best fits the strategy of your organizational leadership.

During this webinar, an audience poll revealed that almost half of attendees (42%) considered their organization to currently be in a dependent mindset when it comes to EHS compliance — meaning they’re generally relying on the skillsets of individual EHS experts to respond to issues as they occur.

With insights from three highly experienced EHS experts — Marieke Bleyenbergh, former Senior HSE leader for Akzo Nobel and Shell; Anthony Wareham, consultant and former Global HSE leader for Philips & Honeywell; and Mary Foley, Enhesa Expert Services Strategy Director — the panel discussed how companies can move along that curve by nurturing a culture that’s committed to surpassing compliance requirements.

So, how can businesses move up the curve towards an interdependent safety mindset?
In this article, we’ll examine the challenges businesses face, plus five lessons from our guest experts in how to successfully create a culture that’s committed to going beyond EHS compliance and enhancing workplace safety.

What challenges do businesses face?

There are three main areas that make up the biggest compliance challenges companies face:

1. Evolving global EHS regulations

More and more, we’re seeing regulations being amended or introduced that reflect societal expectations. As Mary Foley explained: “The rules and regulatory requirements are ever evolving, changing rapidly and very dynamically … understanding your regulatory compliance obligations isn’t a one-and-done.” It requires an understanding of where you are today while watching the horizon for what’s coming and understanding what the impacts of those changes may be. Managing this across multiple jurisdictions, with myriad regulations to follow, can be an enormous challenge for companies, Foley said.

2. Delivering against objectives

The evolving regulatory landscape ties impacts an organization’s ability to deliver on set objectives. Even if the goalposts in the company don’t move, the legislative ones are constantly shifting — making it challenging to fulfil both business and regulatory requirements at the same time.

This can be especially taxing for those businesses at a dependent level on the compliance curve, according to Marieke Bleyenbergh: “If you’re at that dependent level, you’re looking at the absence of accidents and non-compliances as the objectives of the EHS team, so it’s a very defensive way of looking at lagging indicators.” Focusing on past performance and outcomes in this way makes it very hard to learn, said Bleyenbergh, which hinders the ability to move up the maturity curve.

“If you want to evolve to the next levels … start to think about leading indicators … that will show you’re making progress.” Inevitably, targeting leading indicators will also have a positive impact on lagging indicators, while also making EHS objectives a part of the overall business objectives. This is an additional goal, as Bleyenbergh observes:

“Oftentimes business objectives are very much looking at shareholder value, but as you move along the curve, you actually start to look at more integrated objectives. So it’s no longer only shareholder value the company looks at, but more at societal value overall.” This view helps companies tie business objectives to compliance goals and advance along the maturity curve.

3. Culture and leadership

Changing the culture within a business requires buy-in from all levels — and that (pivotally) includes leadership. Where this can be particularly challenging, says Anthony Wareham, is if leadership are happy with the status quo: “You need to recognize that some leadership are going to be happy with dependent [on the compliance curve] — they hire good people, they keep them out of trouble, life goes on and everything [appears] fine.”

It’s in these circumstances that EHS managers need to make a compelling case for change by asking: “What’s in it, not only for shareholders in terms of monetary value, but what’s in it for employees and local communities?

“When you start to look at the benefits, there’s a lot of evidence that the companies taking an interdependent approach do a lot better than those taking a reactive approach.” It’s an HSE leader’s job to articulate those reasons, according to Wareham, as “many managers are simply not aware of these issues because they’ve managed to a formula that’s worked well in the past.”

Getting that commitment from leadership is vital, Wareham observed, and that requires resolve to overcome challenges and set-backs along the way: “When you embark on this journey, you may have a lot of great ideas about what good looks like, but you’ve got to convince your leadership that it’s also good for them to support it.”

The success of this type of change cannot be forced, said Wareham. Instead, it needs to be collaborative and encouraging.

Five steps to a culture of compliance commitment

In the webinar, our guest experts summarized five key aspects of shifting company culture to one that holistically addresses health and safety.

1. Set your foundation in societal expectations and regulations

It isn’t enough simply to follow regulations as they currently are — they’re changing rapidly and are being heavily influenced by social expectations. One salient example of this, says Mary Foley, is the recent proliferation of regulations regarding the right to disconnect: “We all have smartphones with access to our work emails and messages, so for a lot of us the boundaries between work and non-work life are blurring. It’s no coincidence that the right to disconnect is now starting to become enshrined in regulations.”

This trend is only set to continue and increase — with new issues such as psychosocial risks, working from home, and the protection of employees from domestic violence now being adopted into regulatory considerations.

We now live in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (commonly termed “VUCA”) world, according to Marieke Bleyenbergh, which calls “for many organizations to become more proactive and more resilient.”

For businesses to stay ahead, they must pay attention to what’s on the regulatory horizon, not just what’s right in front of them today.

2. Start with your leadership

To thrive in a VUCA world demands a clear focus on the topics covered by regulatory requirements as well as topics that need improvement internally. “We can keep ourselves busy day and night, and not make one step forward,” warned Bleyenbergh. “So that calls for leadership to really set those priorities and get clarity of which elements to work on.”

The definition of leadership here shouldn’t only involve senior management, the three experts agreed. Bleyenbergh also considers it important to “get an understanding of who are the informal leaders in the organization — who are the opinion-makers?” Leveraging these social leaders from within the workforce can be instrumental in getting the organization as a whole to subscribe to the changes businesses want to achieve, while setting a precedence of internal empowerment, commitment, and development — all of which saves significant time and resources on sourcing and training new staff. Not only does it also increase engagement and the likelihood of company-wide adoption, but it sets a great example of exercising top-down trust that can be reciprocated and emulated elsewhere.

A powerful way of doing this is to develop a clear change story that can be articulated to and resonate with any audience in the company, so everyone fully understands what good looks like and why it’s worth pursuing that change.

3. Know what good looks like and get leadership’s commitment to it

Establishing what a good compliance program looks like is a little more complicated than simply finding all the relevant regulations and adhering to them. As Anthony Wareham put it, “a regulation in one country may be quite high and prescriptive, while in another it might be extremely low. If you’re a multinational company, you’ve got to bring everyone to the common denominator — which is usually the ‘home country’’.”

This means raising the bar and treating every employee in every jurisdiction the same.

Once that defining line of what a compliance culture looks like has been set, then it can be presented to the already-primed leadership (whether senior management or opinion-makers) to get the buy-in that’s needed to pull — rather than push — the business in the right direction.

4. Create a learning organization built on trust

Instilling a culture of learning at all levels is a powerful strategy for building a better EHS compliance culture, but to do this takes a change in approach that actively encourages trusting behavior.

According to Wareham, trusting and training people to be accountable is what helps make them the future leaders through experiencing decision-making for themselves: “You have to be tolerant, because people won’t get it right every time, but if you can say ‘I’m going to be away next week and I’m empowering you to stand in for me,’ they’ll come to feel the same way about their own people.” That chain of command where trust empowers people is a fantastic learning opportunity for teams, Wareham believes.

This also enables better communication and transparency, says Bleyenbergh. “We’re all human and we all make mistakes, but how easy is it for us to actually talk about them?” As trust builds, so too does the sense of security to raise issues and talk about what lessons can be learned from mistakes, rather than hiding them away through fear of negative repercussions.

5. Systems and processes to embed a better compliance culture

An effective way of making the desired cultural changes a part of standard practice, according to Bleyenbergh, is to embed them in regular activity cadences: “We need to find in our daily, weekly, and monthly cadences — those moment where we can anchor this new culture in the way that we operate.”

This can include regularly scheduling proactive activities, such as Gemba Walks — where management visit the workplace to observe processes, ask questions, and find improvement opportunities.

Some examples of questions to ask workers:

• What’s made your work difficult today?
• Are you missing anything that could make your work go smoother?
• Have you had any ‘OMG’ moments where something could have gone seriously wrong?

Not only do these types of questions ascertain what problems need to be fixed, but they instill a sense of care and, ultimately, trust. Eventually, the transformation to a culture based in trust will happen, and employees won’t need to be asked — they’ll bring their concerns or observations to you.

But, Wareham reminds us, this is a long-game change that needs to happen through repetition and perseverance: “Studies show it takes 20 to 30 times of repeatedly doing something for it become habitual, so you can’t expect everyone to do it the first or second or third time. You’ve got to be resilient and that means your managers have got to be resilient too.”

Going beyond compliance takes major change — but also has major rewards

It’s evident that there are many obstacles to making a cultural shift that prioritizes compliance and safety across an entire organization, but the benefits of overcoming them make those challenges worthwhile. Clearly identifying and communicating those advantages and how to go about accomplishing them is key to the investment and support of leadership, management, and the wider company, only some of which have been covered in this article.

To find out more and hear from our expert guest speakers, watch the recording of the webinar today.