EHS Trends to Watch and How to Keep up

Hilary: Hello listeners, we’re back for another episode of the Elevate EHS Podcast. I’m your host, Hilary Framke, I’ve got Jon Scheibe here today. Hi, Jon. 

Jon: Hi, Hilary. Thanks for having me today. 

Hilary: Oh, I’m excited to have you for this special segment today. We’ve got some new stuff for you listeners. We’re going to do some trends today, so the questions will be, do you see this trend and how are you dealing with it?

So Jon, thank you for agreeing to do something a little bit off the cuff. 

Jon: Excited to. Good topics. 

Hilary: But as always, we’ll start with a little bit about you. So tell our listeners about your EHS journey so far. How did you find EHS? Why do you stay? 

Jon: Absolutely. So I got started by accident with, environment, health and safety is as many people did 20, 25 years ago. I started out in business and toxicology and industrial hygiene with degrees. But I went to Drexel and Drexel has a co-op program. So by chance, my first co-op, I thought it was a really interesting job that happened to be in EHS. And that’s how I got started with an internship. And my boss actually left there.

And he went to a new place to work and hired me. So I actually finished school at nights while I was working full time in environment, health, and safety. And where I went to was oil refining. And I look at that as one of the most lucky places to start my career. It’s an industry with a ton of money. It has big booms and big busts as we all know, but I was surrounded by EHS professionals, right? There was an environmental department, there was a process safety department, there was a industrial hygiene department, and I could be surrounded by people that had made their careers of that in an industry with high amount of resources.

So I was lucky to have opportunities in getting every certification I could imagine. Traveling to fire school in Texas and, getting scaffold competent person classes when I was 19 years old. It was a very lucky start for me and I was really hooked from the beginning there with the diversity of environment, health and safety, the amount of obligations and, the amount of every day being completely different is really exciting.

My style is I like to do a lot of things. And I think, 23 years later, it is still just as exciting. My journey has been from petrochemicals to specialty chemicals to base chemicals now to paints and coatings and, mixing things up and reactors and vessels is as exciting to me today as ever, and I see new and different EHS issues, but also sometimes the same ones I saw 20 years ago. I really enjoy it, but that’s how I got into it. Just a simple co-op experience. 

Hilary: That is so interesting. And wow, you’re like me. You were very lucky to stumble into it early in your career and get a lot of exposure on risk and management styles and types of EHS implementation. It is very appetizing and very interesting for those who love that like dynamic work environment. As long as you can, be resilient. 

Jon: Resilience is key. Absolutely. 

Hilary: I knew that from the prep call, you’d be the perfect guest for this new type of podcast segment. So what we’re going to do listeners we’re going to discuss some high impact trends [00:03:00] that we feel like we’re seeing, I’m seeing inside EHS. And then how it’ll work, I’m going to throw out that trend to Jon, and he’s going to share his thoughts on whether he’s seeing it and how he’s dealing with it. So the first one is interesting.

I’m seeing more C-Suite leaders with commercial backgrounds versus operational backgrounds. Now, are you seeing this trend, Jon? And why does it matter to EHS do you think? 

Jon: Probably over the last 10 to 15 years, I’ve definitely seen it more. You know, you see the business unit kind of concept coming through in a lot of organizations where it used to be, manufacturing was over here.

The commercial team was over here. They met where they needed to at the top and they work together. Now you see, pretty often, at least in my experience that they want one value stream, right? The value stream mapping. So the commercial person is often the business case leader.

So, you know, it makes sense that alright, manufacturing is reporting up through them. Quality, they have their own HR work streams and EHS is working through there. So you have one business unit where a person can make all the decisions for that product line or that business line. From that respect, I totally understand, where it challenges environment, health and safety. And the things that I see as concerns is, you could pick how that vice president of manufacturing got there, they used to be a plant manager.

Before they were a plant manager, they were probably a plant engineer. Everyone knew those paths. And by going through those paths, they had experienced things in the plant, right? They know what a bad day looks like in a plant. They maybe experienced incidents, whether it’s a fire or an injury or something, they had that lived experience.

They know when the plant’s down and there’s commercial pressures on. When the commercial person takes over, typically their background may be sales or finance or something completely different in customer facing roles. They’ve not seen or lived the same experience as a person who came up through the plants. Which is great that they offer a unique and different perspective.

But also I think in the EHS communications, when we talk about things that would be normal to a plant person, it’s not to them, right? So there’s not that innate core understanding of what issues may be lying out there and what we consider just normal everyday things. They don’t know because they didn’t experience it.

So I find a lot more education is needed. And I also find that some expectations are misaligned that we need to backtrack and go to what are the fundamentals of that issue before we can talk about solving that issue? Some of those conversations are really productive. I think others, it’s hard, right?

You take these senior leaders that work in, 5, 10, 30 minute bursts on completely different topics and you need them to understand a complex EHS topic at one of their plants. It creates a lot of challenges. Challenges that I think we haven’t really set up good systems to work around yet.

Hilary: Oh, I totally agree. This comes back to immersion, right? When you think about where is EHS most present in a value stream of a total business? It’s going to be operations, right? It’s manufacturing, it’s operations, distribution, where all the compliance, the regulatory burden is. We don’t often, due to lack of resourcing, get over to the commercial teams in the way that we probably should.

And we don’t have that same kind of systemized EHS immersion and exposure. So you’re right. The C-Suite leaders are coming from not really having to deal with EHS very much at all. And then they have this EHS leader who now is all these questions, all these expectations, put my KPIs on the scorecard, right?

I need this big budget. I need all this time from you. And they’re like, who are you again? 

Jon: Exactly. 

Hilary: So I love all of your points. And I think I’ve seen this trend. I’ve experienced it. It’s very frustrating to have a senior leader who doesn’t know your value, doesn’t understand what you should be included in or not.

So that education piece is so key. To start to explain to them here is what excellence in EHS looks like. Here’s why you should care about it. Here’s how we get there, right? All of those onboarding for your C-Suite leaders.

Jon: And they can accidentally introduce a lot of risk without knowing it. If they say, hey, let’s move this production line to this facility, or let’s introduce these new chemicals or let’s commit to a deadline. They may not be understanding the risk or the amount of steps it takes to do that safely, right? These risk assessments have to happen, or these machine changes need to happen, or this training and education, are all steps to get to where they want, but they’ve made commitments quicker because in their mind, you know that they don’t have all those barriers.

I’m just moving something from here to there, or I’m using this equipment more than I have previously without understanding what is already attached with that equipment safety programs. So you have to be the ‘person of no’ again, right? We start our careers as the ‘person of no’ as some people see us as, “No, you can’t climb up there without fall protection.

No, you can’t do that.” We work to build those relationships of yes, right? You can do it if you do these safe things. If we build this job this way, you can do it safely. But now you’re doing that at the, like you said, the C-Suite level, and you have to tell them, no, you can’t put that chemical in that place because of this rule or that hazard, or you need to add X amount of dollars of capital to what you want to do.

And that’s going to take months to install and properly set up. That part can be a challenge for all the parties involved. All of us, we’ve got to go back to that culture of, no, it can’t be done that way. 

Hilary: And I think again, back to the helping them to understand the constructs of regulatory compliance. Especially from a global perspective, I had a situation where a C-Suite leader made the decision to purchase a system from Italy and put it in a United States facility and didn’t tell EHS. Come to find out, it was nowhere near lockout tagout compliant. We had to go back and rework the entire system to make it compatible.

It was just like an extra like $500,000 somewhere north of that. They were very unhappy with me, right? My response was, had you involved me in the change management conversation and the purchase of this equipment at the design phase, I would have called that out because Italy and the US have very different rules when it comes to machinery. We need to make sure we’re compliant with where we put it. So exactly like you said, Jon. I think this is a big deal. This is a big trend. Look, if you’re having trouble hitting that C-Suite, it may be from an issue like this. So consider it. Try and attack it. Have the conversation up front with your C-Suite leader. Find a work route. 

Jon: That’s right. Yep. You have to get creative again. Yes. 

Hilary: You sometimes do, right? Okay. Let’s go to the next trend. Are you seeing the trends where EHS doesn’t sit at the executive table and is sometimes viewed as a sub function without the same strategic involvement, decision making capability as maybe other functions like Quality, HR, Operations?

Jon: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s been a trend my entire career, to be honest with you. I think some companies have acknowledged that EHS participation more than others. And I think it’s kind of risk dependent, but I definitely see that as common now. And it goes really hand in hand with the last discussion too, right?

Just who’s leading those organizations and whether they value that continuous support or engagement of EHS. I do see the kids table kind of discussion versus the executive table. 

Discussing with my peers the different groups that they report into it was very eye opening for me that it’s very common across industry that we’re all in different organizational pieces and how that really functions. So for me, one of the things that’s been important in my career is to find the advocates in the different executive group. And sometimes you find them in strange places. Like I’ve often found the lawyers are a big advocate for EHS, right? They’re very risk averse people.

They understand rules and laws that we have. And they can really help elevate EHS, right? Because they are in the board meetings. They are in the executive meetings. And same thing with Human Resources. They’re dealing with a lot of employment regulations. And they deal with the parts of employee injuries and just regular illness and the benefits programs.

I think we have natural advocates in what we do. And I think the more we can work with the commercial leaders or the operational leaders that are on the executive team, find which ones are your advocates. Don’t spend all of your time working on the ones that are your problem people or the ones that maybe don’t get it yet.

If you have those advocates that are always going to be in the room, whether you are or not in the room, then the voice will come up, right? We should consider EHS or we should bring EHS into this discussion and they could be proxies for you. 

Hilary: I love that response. And I think too often we do go back to the brick wall. There’s a window over here, try something else. Go back to the drawing board. I think also a strategy I’ve used, sometimes if you’re not getting immersion at the executive level to go to flip it to start from the bottom up, right? Start with those frontline leaders, those middle managers, the site plant managers, right?

Get them all advocating and on board with your program. They’re the ones really interacting with it the most anyways, right? And get them speaking the language that you want to their leaders up and then sometimes you can get in that way. Because they start to see, “Oh, you’re making my skip level employees very happy, very satisfied. They love this program. It’s changed the engagement. The employees are happier. I’m hearing a lot of positive feedback. Maybe there’s something to what you’re saying. 

Jon: Absolutely. Yeah. And it’s all stacking up advocates. We preach that when we’re talking about building culture. That culture has to come from all different directions.

It’s the same thing as, building up that place at the table and the understanding in the organization. It’s how many people understand what we’re aiming for. And at all levels, it’s important, like you said. When I talk to younger EHS professionals or Managers or Directors that work for me, I tell them it’s less and less about your technical ability as you come through EHS and ascend in your career.

It’s more about those relationships that you can build. So you need to be spending a lot more time on relationships than you need to be on the technical aspects of EHS, the more senior you get. So those things that you just laid out are the primary conversations that are driven when you’re not in the room, right?

That everyone knows what the expectations from EHS are, whether you’re there or not. And I know many have said this, it’s a dream that we shouldn’t need EHS professionals the way we have them everywhere. We should be able to train and coach people in the field, the frontline leaders, plant managers, commercial leaders to do 90 percent of what is compliance.

We should be really working on, the culture and the best practices and the systems building that are really going to be preventative for us. 

Hilary: But that business politics, not something that’s taught to EHS leaders in their career, kind of have to learn by doing and it’s a difficult skill.

It’s something that is very, I think, undervalued as far as EHS competencies that can really get in the way of being successful. Another tip I would throw out is, we miss opportunities, I think, mostly because we’re so overwhelmed with the things that we have to do to participate in other projects that aren’t EHS projects.

And use some of those soft skills that are transferable, like project management, investigation, controlled risk analysis and control. Be more willing to help with a quality problem or productivity problem or an innovation problem, and at that executive level and put your hand up to run something like that to show your value and build credibility so that they see the value of EHS.

Jon: I think that’s terrific advice. You couldn’t be more right. The things that we do really well, things like incident management, incident investigation, you’re right. Those things can be applied to any situation that’s not going as desired. Our systematic risk assessment, core kind of competency. It doesn’t matter what we’re applying it to, if we can analyze the layers of protection or the layers of defenses for a quality issue, you’re absolutely right. We can help find solutions and you’re right, that’s hard to do. We have to insert ourselves and volunteer ourselves to do more to spread that knowledge and that ability.

Hilary: Yep, but it’s like you scratch my back. I scratch yours, right? So I’ll help you with this quality issue and then we’re going to talk about our ergonomics issue that I’ve been trying to get on your calendar for months and months. 

Jon: Exactly 

Hilary: All right next trend. So oh trendy topics like mental health I’m thinking is becoming very trendy. Sustainability, packaging design. This is very distracting for executive leaders from what we should be working on.

Are you seeing this Oh, I want this golden egg. So the things maybe we really need to do need to wait because I’ve got to deal with this trendy topic, whether or not it’s a problem? 

Jon: Absolutely. I think sustainability is the biggest one. When I started my career, I don’t even know that was a word.

And then, it has taken on a life these past 10 years and it has changed so much. When you look at the late 20 teens, 2018, 2019, 2020, every company, it seems was coming out with their 2030 and 2040 goals and, committing to just massive changes because, it felt good.

It was all over the media, it was all of the talk in the executive peers kind of level, right? What is your company committed to? It came up in every shareholder meeting. It really changed the way I think the last couple years of business have gone and whether an executive is an expert or not.

And it, they’re aware of it now more than they ever have been. And I agree, for us, it doesn’t change the core daily operations of environmental compliance, safety, the regulatory burden that’s constantly increasing there. It’s an add on and while it’s important, I don’t think it changes what our core mission should be.

The concepts are, how can we reduce emissions, which we’ve been preaching in environmental for forever, I think. But when we say maximum available control technology or the five Z regulation for air emissions, nobody wants to hear that. It’s sustainability is a lot more fun and saying, scope one and scope two. So I do think that takes a lot from EHS to constantly be working in those new things that are important, but also keeping everyone grounded in what are whether you have a management system or you’re guiding principles or what your true values of the organization are.

We have to make sure everyone is starting from there and we’re approaching things like sustainability very reasonably. I think mental health has been an interesting one, right? We hear a lot about it, especially since COVID. In Europe, our operations, we see regulations for mental health. Our teams in the United Kingdom, we have mental health first aiders, and that’s by regulation. That hasn’t spread to this side of the Atlantic, but I assume those ideas will.

Certainly throughout Europe, we have many EHS team members that are getting certified in mental health, and you see new partnerships forming with Human Resources, and if you have medical staff, and it’s definitely new things that are important, but I think the way that you phrase that trendy topics is right, is we can’t stop the things we’re already doing.

These are, how do we integrate it into what we’re doing, and that, that can be overwhelming when we’re challenged with resources already.

Hilary: Absolutely. And I think a very detailed data oriented strategy has to be taken to say just because this is trendy doesn’t mean it’s a problem for us. We have to first decide if this is a problem for us and like, how big of the pie chart is it?

Just because sustainability is the hot word of the decade doesn’t mean that we’re a huge environmental impactor. We have to first decide how big is our environmental impact and if it is significant, and after benchmarking analysis and all those things, we see we’re not where we should be. Yeah, we need to put a lot of resources in. And just because it’s environmental related doesn’t mean that EHS even has the bandwidth to manage it. You may need to decide you’ve got to bring on a whole sustainability team and there should be a separate corporate structure. That all depends on the workload, right?

But I think how to manage and navigate this as an EHS practitioner is to like, give it relevance. Yes, that’s important. I see that. I see why you’re concerned about that. I care about what you care about, as an executive for the business, we’re here to support you. Let me take some time to do some analysis and get back to you about how big of a deal this is and what kind of pace we need to take to make progress. And then just be prepared. It may mean more money. It may mean more staff. It may mean technology or consultancy. Don’t think that you can just add this on to my responsibilities and I’ll be able to manage all the other things at the same level. 

Jon: Yeah, no, I think that’s a really good point. That’s where EHS professionals can really help. Because we often are grounded in data, right? And being able to tell a good story with data is important. And one that we often don’t do well in EHS I’ve found, because we’re natural teachers, right? We always want to teach people why and how.

And take them through a journey so they understand and most executives they [00:20:00] want the five minute graphic like you just described. They want the pie chart. And that actually made me think of an example, not too far in my recent past, but we were talking about our water consumption as being a big issue.

And the simple question that asked was what, why is it a big issue? Yes, we use a lot of water, compared to what, compared to a water park? No, we don’t use a lot of water. Compared to a city? No, less than four hours in the morning, they’ll consume more water in the city than we will an entire year across our company in 40 countries.

So it’s all relative. And we got to find the right way to tell that story. Because what is the real issue there is we don’t want as a company to be taking water from a water stressed area that’s going to harm people in public. So the first question we asked, are we operating in any water stressed areas?

And the answer was no. Where we had offices, it’s I can’t make them flush the toilets less, that amount of water is not stressing the area. We’ve got to bring the trendy topic back down to reality and make meaningful comparisons, because in some cases it may show us we do have a problem and that is worth investment and changes in the way we operate. But many of them are simply we’re aware of it, we’re measuring it, but it’s not an issue we should pursue. 

Hilary: And just like with any function of the business, we tell the story to shareholders about what they should care about with us, right? So we need to spin that story correctly. Here is why this is an issue. We’ve done this materiality assessment. We’ve determined that we’re below benchmarking. And so here’s our plan to fill that gap, right? This is what we should be concerned about. And it’s perfectly okay for that to be not what shareholders would expect. We tell them what it is. Maybe for us, the biggest issue is packaging.

We didn’t have good packaging design. It’s very inefficient. We’ve done the square footage analysis. We’re wasting this much percentage of every package, with excess packaging, which creates issues in recycling and landfill and all those things. Have that conversation, explain to them how you came to the analysis. And then say, here’s what we’re doing to improve packaging design over the next ten years. You tell that story but you have to know what to say. That’s where the analysis comes back to it. I love that. I think that’s super helpful, Jon. Thank you for your insights on that. 

Jon: Yeah, absolutely.

Hilary: Next trend. I know what you’re going to say about this one. More and more regulations and expanded shareholder expectations with smaller and smaller EHS budget both in people and money. What can be done about this push pull?

Jon: Yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever met an EHS professional that doesn’t have this concern. So absolutely. I think it’s something we all have to face and it’s not going away. The question is, are we going to keep complaining about it or, what can we do to try and make things better? My personal opinion is we’ve got to share the workload. We’ve got to look at what our role traditionally was. Where we’re doing everything, we’re doing all the training, where we’re writing all the procedures, were following up with all the audits in the field and kind of move away from that model as much as we can to, Okay, our customers are very capable of doing those things. So how do we turn them into the doers, right? So it becomes a function of operations or of commercial or manufacturing that you know they’re self serving on their compliance needs and we’re more guiding them. But you have to start with establishing the boundaries for that relationship with leadership.

You can’t just go in and say, I’m not doing training anymore. They’re going to find somebody who will do training for their group, that’s an easy solution. What we need to teach them is, I can teach your teams how to do this training so that, one, we’ve upskilled them and two, you don’t need me around to execute on EHS compliance every day. Whether that compliance is regulatory or it’s your company specific compliance, but it can help you to drive up your cultural maturity. Right now if 100 people can deliver all of the compliance training that’s needed for a year versus the 10 people in the EHS group. You’ve now got 100 advocates that can speak to that. Now, the quality may not be exactly the same from day one, but you can work on that, right? Your train the trainer programs, but it comes back to agreements. You have to sit down with your customers and you have to say, These are the 1000 requirements. So you’ve got to come to the table with what are those 1000 requirements? And you’ve got to go through and say, What can your team self service on? And ask for help versus us do for you. And how can we make sure that’s a requirement of jobs for whether it’s a supervisor, a manager, a leader. How can we build in with their learning process so that we don’t have? Well, there is the EHS process and here’s their job learning process and here’s the quality learning process. We want to build those things together, but you’ve got to start by identifying what those things are and helping them to see what the opportunities could be and you have to think what’s your end goal, in one year, three years from now, where do we really want to be on compliance? And who’s going to manage it? Because you’re right. If we change nothing, we need to hire more people or otherwise people are going to get burnt out. They’re going to quit. They’re going to leave and there aren’t enough jobs that we’re all going to get promoted. So you’re going to have turnover in your EHS group for something that’s very preventable by building it into your existing management system. So that is worth spending time on. It’s worth getting with your leaders and talking about these challenges, but you have to come with solutions.

Hilary: It’s a very awkward conversation, isn’t it, Jon, to sit there and say, Oh yeah, all these things that I’m responsible for are in bad shape? The immediate response is then why are you here? Because that would be poor performance. I do think, again, back to navigation here. Maybe not everything all at once. Just pick a couple key gaps, that you think are driving poor performance in KPIs, and engagement in your cultural landscape that you want to see change in the next one to two years that, like you said, that you need to maybe restructure in your business or reset the system of how we’re actually executing this program. I would not go in, I’ve made this mistake, so please learn from me. Don’t go in with, here are all the programs that I would score inadequate. 

Jon: You have to turn it into an opportunity, right? Here’s a way I see we can solve this problem and here’s how your team can help solve that. You’re absolutely right. Otherwise it becomes dumping and we can’t pretend we’re the only group that’s overwhelmed.

Everyone is lean as they can be. I like how you phrase that is, tie it to data, tie it to things that are current in your organization, tie it to things other company mission, vision, objectives, and strategies, right? How can you insert into all of those things and use it as an opportunity rather than, here’s a huge problem. I need somebody else to do it. We can’t do it anymore. 

Hilary: Exactly. And I had thrown myself under the bus for having made this mistake. And then, the executive leader said to me, Okay, now I feel like EHS is on fire, and I’ve got to go out and hire a consultant or hire ten new people just so that we don’t have a fatality.

And I’m like, something has gone awry. This is not the response I expected you would have, but I made the mistake of sharing too much. Putting too much on a plate, too many problems, not enough solutions. So I think that is a really key factor in being successful in turning things around is to say, Here’s what I’ve identified I need you to know that it’s a key call out. Here’s what I’d like to do to solve that issue. Can I get your support? Can we make this change? Can we get this cross functional initiative on board? So that we can be more successful and be picky. Go in and be picky. And this has been a problem for 15 or 20 years, but it’s just not important information. It’s a problem today. And you think it’s a root cause, a leading factor in why you may not be performing at the level that you expect. So I think that’s great, Jon. Thank you for sharing that. And look, if you’ve made this mistake, you’re in our camp. Don’t feel bad, just be resilient, get back up and try again, maybe with a different approach.

There’s a disconnect, maybe between EHS certifications. Conveying a level of job competence, and maybe practitioners actually executing practical skills. 

I can just tell that you’ve had such a illustrious career and you’ve done so much for the field. I really appreciate your openness and trying something a little different on my podcast today. I really had a good time. 

Jon: Me too. Thank you so much for having me, Hilary. It’s been a great experience.

Hilary: Goodbye, listeners. See you next time.