Excellent Environmental and Safety Performance Lies in Best Practices

 

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I have yet to meet a business owner, general manager, or professional who strives for failure.  Companies crave success.  Environmental and safety performance rests in the successful implementation of best practices.  Without these workplace instructions, task execution can quickly become a life or death issue.

 

Yet, many organizations neglect approaching best practices in a meaningful way. The reasons in favor of workplace best practices give powerful support against overlooking them.    

 

Best Practices Provide Structure

 

Journeying from point A to B can prove problematic without a decent map.  Best practices provide that guide in the workplace.  Moreover, a structured design for tasks creates a sturdy foundation for better performance. 

 

Remove the Guesswork Associated with Tasks

 

Implementing workplace best practices erase ambiguity associated with tasks.  The best practices come in written form.  This component makes it easier to know what needs to be done and how to do it.

 

Now workers can focus on being productive and efficient.  They don’t have to wander around in the wilderness, contemplating which steps to execute to stay safe and protect the environment.   

 

Provide Support for Communication and Training

 

Best practices also give an exceptional starting point for educating employees.  The procedures documenting a company’s best practices should be required reading for workers.  Also, the written documents serve as a handy reference for future use.

 

Furthermore, best practices information provides integral pieces for training presentations, online courses, toolbox talks, environmental and safety meeting topics, and more.  Even communication pieces like bulletins, newsletters, and signage ultimately draw their messages from the best practices utilized on-site.

 

Best Practices Promote Expected Results

 

Predictable outcomes bode better for any business than unpredictable ones.  Unforeseen events often lead to more time and money, making corrections to achieve an acceptable result.  

 

Lessen the Potential for Undesired Events

 

Workplace best practices do not serve their rightful purpose if they fail to prevent adverse outcomes.  Mitigation of pollution, injuries, illness, and property damage leads to better environmental and safety performance.

 

For instance, mounting a set of COVID-19 best practices in the workplace helps employers prevent infection from the novel coronavirus.  They lower the potential of creating a COVID hotspot, which all should agree is an undesired event.  

 

Create Reproducible Outcomes

 

Furthermore, best practices are to be followed over and over again.  Once you have an established process that works, you can rest assured to have safe, environment-protecting results over time.

 

These reproducible, positive results provide reliable data with which to make sound business decisions.  Thus, organizations can reap the benefit of better planning for the future, knowing they have built their plan on experience rather than speculation.  

 

Best Practices Set Baselines to Evaluate Against for Continuous Improvement

 

In the last section, we discussed how best practices help lead to results companies can predict.  Moreover, these outcomes serve as guidance to safety and environmental performance through continuous improvement.

 

Targets for Conformance Inherently Set

 

Workplace best practices set targets by nature.  When a procedure or work instruction gets written, the business expects it to be followed.  After training and follow-up communication, the organization should expect conformance to be near 100%.

 

With this inherent target in hand, companies can easily spot when workers do not adhere to the written best practices.  These non-conformances embody weaknesses upon which the business can improve for enhanced environmental and safety performance.    

 

Corrective Actions Can Build on the Established Foundation

 

With an organization’s weaknesses identified, the selection of suitable corrective actions to resolve issues can begin.  The task of incorporating the chosen additional items into established best practices builds on the existing measures.  The final outcome provides a more robust environmental and safety program.

 

By resolving problems through improvement, companies cannot help but improve their environmental and safety performance.  Furthermore, continuously building on the existing system supports enhanced results as the organizations move forward into the future.  

 

Concluding Thoughts

 

Environmental and safety best practices serve as the backbone of the soundest, most resilient environmental, health, and safety (EHS) programs.  They provide structure, reproducible results, and drivers for continuous improvement. 

 

Without defined best practices, EHS programs and systems lack an essential ingredient to thrive.  Additionally, excellent environmental and safety performance can swiftly drift out of reach.