In the last fifteen years, the environment has moved to centre stage on the business agenda. From a handful of large multinationals in the extractive and manufacturing industries in the early 90s, it has now become inconceivable for a company in the FTSE 100 not have an environmental management programme of some kind. Increasingly, we find FTSE 250 companies following the trend.

But most companies still struggle to place environmental management comfortably in business strategy, risk management, performance measurement and assurance programmes.

We have seen a number of clear trends in the way environmental, health and safety (EHS) issues are managed by business:

•  Corporate strategy has progressed its goals:
   •  from legal compliance
   •  to cost savings (eco-efficiency)
   •  to risk management (reputation, market access)
   •  to opportunity (‘green' sourcing and products, energy services, recycling, etc)

•  Operational integration of measures to address environmental, health and safety issues. Initially this was because many of the sources of potential incidents and impacts were found to be common across these issues in manufacturing, process industries. More recently, consumer concerns about product safety and environmental sustainability have started to merge and focus on similar causes in their design, sourcing and manufacture.

•  Value chain scope , looking beyond the factory gates along the supply chain to suppliers, product, consumers and disposal; looking beyond local process pollution, incidents and waste to sourcing, consumption of natural resources and lifecycle sustainability.

•  Financial accounting of environmental impacts and management has re-focused from cost control, to cost savings, to strategic investment.

•  Employee and stakeholder involvement has shifted from ‘need to know' communications to controlled engagement, to co-ownership on issues such as waste recycling, energy conservation and workforce health, safety, welfare and productivity.

As a result, Environment, Health and Safety have become core aspects of business success, not only in the context of legal compliance and business risk, but also as key differentiators with shareholders, employees, communities, consumers and business customers.

The challenge remains how to integrate the management and assurance of these issues into both the personality and underlying fabric of a company, where they will become self-sustaining motors of performance improvement.

•  Integrated approach . EHS forms a core aspect of the wider sustainable development and responsible business agendas. It's therefore important to align EHS strategy and management with other related aspects such as business ethics, supply chain responsibility, socially responsible investment, product integrity, stakeholder engagement, etc. Failure to consider these other aspects can lead to sub-optimal programmes, conflicting resources, wasted communications, residual risks and lost business opportunities. The Reassurance Network is in an excellent position to provide this integrated approach given our focus on the wider agenda combined with extensive individual experience in EHS management.

•  Experience . The Reassurance Network has specific expertise in both strategic and operational aspects of EHS planning and management, building on industrial and consulting experience of its core members who have undertaken EHS assignments for major corporations including BP, Pfizer, P&G, Novartis, Hyundai, Unilever and Next.

•  Diversity of skills . Our team can apply a wide range of skills to your challenge, including technical and management systems auditing (including ISO14001, EMAS and OHSAS18001 experience), corporate awareness briefings, operational training, data management systems design and verification, operational eco-efficiency reviews and strategy and policy development.

Our services revolve around some key questions which regularly come up:

•  are we focusing on the right EHS issues to support our business?
•  do we have a policy that reflects these issues, is also valuable to our stakeholders and acting as a real reference pint for performance management, monitoring and reporting?
•  are our people behind our approach to EHS management and enabled to innovate and deliver continuous performance?
•  are our business processes aligned with our long-term EHS policies and shorter-term priorities?
•  are our operational management systems working for us, could we integrate EHS issues more efficiently into the way we work?
•  are we monitoring the right performance data rigorously and reporting on the right indicators, for internal management and for external stakeholders? Can we and others depend on the reported data?

Too many EHS policies are developed without a full and balanced consideration of the company's business activities and its stakeholders' interests and concerns. Fewer still take account of how environmental issues are relevant to corporate strategy and business plans. As a result, it is often difficult to implement policies without apparent conflict with other business priorities and in a way that brings assurance to key stakeholders.

We encourage corporate decision-makers to link policy development (or review) with strategy development. This involves undertaking a review of how environmental issues relate to both current operations and future business development, considering the views of current and emerging stakeholders, legislative trends and developments, and making reference to key aspects of business plans relating to R&D, products and services, regional markets, sourcing and supply chains, transport and distribution systems.

Our process involves a combination of external research, management interviews, operational reviews and co-development workshops. It is important that this process involves participation from the key functional managers who will carry the burden of policy implementation.

In recent years, a fundamental change has appeared in the nature of EHS communications. No longer is it a simple case of raising awareness of the importance of environmental, health and safety policies and management. Employees are generally already aware of the issues and are looking for the company to demonstrate their commitment and to provide the resources and processes for doing their jobs responsibly, safely and eco-efficiently.

We have found that this enthusiasm for EHS provides an excellent opportunity to go a step further – to use EHS as a means of networking between operational and business groups across the company. We can help design, plan and deliver employee communications programmes that not only initiate and support employee EHS initiatives (e.g. relating to energy, recycling, transport, safe driving) but use this as a platform for building informal employee discussion on related operational issues.

The rise of EHS management and audit systems, as well as the relevant standards, such as ISO14001, EMAS and OHSAS 18001, has resulted in great improvements in performance, as well as delivering improved assurance to internal and external stakeholders alike, that the issues are being addressed appropriately and systematically. However, we have found that as the need to manage EHS issues has extended beyond the factory gates, the standard operational approach and use of management systems have not always been so effective, for various reasons linked to operational control, access to data, and visibility.

We can provide an operational review, extending from product design and management of suppliers, through to manufacturing and product take-back, to identify that:

•  policies are understood, implemented and are applicable to the business.
•  accountabilities, capabilities, operational procedures and performance management incentives are combining to manage risks and inform management of sub-standard performance.
•  current management systems are not overlapping or in conflict, and that there is clarity over how specific issues should be managed, e.g. where separate environmental and health and safety management systems may specify different requirements for responding to a spill or hazardous incident.
•  management systems are well documented and embedded in operational practices and training.

As a result we deliver a set of recommendations for improving the management of EHS issues and the policies and systems which should be driving continuous improvement and supporting business strategy.

As part of report verification, we review and test a wide range of monitoring and reporting systems for environmental, health and safety data. Despite the advent of certifiable management systems, the actual monitoring and reporting of performance data can still be informal and not very rigorous. The danger is that business managers, board members and key external stakeholders may be over-reliant on the existence of an audited management system for assurance of EHS management, without having regular access to reliable key performance indicators.

We can provide a rigorous review of your EHS performance monitoring and reporting to answer the following questions:

•  are operational and senior managers receiving the right performance data to:

           •  deliver assurance that performance is meeting expectations, and

           •  enable the optimisation of operational processes (materials and natural resource management,                 organisation of labour) and inform more strategic decisions (re products, suppliers, markets,                 acquisitions, etc.)?

•  is EHS performance data being monitored, analysed, reported and collated in a robust and systematic way, such that they can be relied upon for such decision making?

•  is the company's overall EHS performance being communicated externally in a way which meets regulatory requirements, delivers stakeholder assurance and supports reputation?