It’s official: customers prefer sustainable companies.
Polls have shown for some time that Americans are increasingly worried about the environment – and they want to fix it. They also recognize that companies play a huge role in environmental health, and that customers have a lot of purchasing power to force companies to pay attention.
As such, environmental performance is no longer a nice feature. It’s a necessity for companies that want to survive in the future. Here are three steps to improve environmental performance in your organization.
1. Examine Your Environmental Policy
The first step in improving your environmental performance is to understand your current environmental policy.
Environmental performance begins with an environmental policy that clearly communicates standards of success and expectations of performance. If your environmental performance isn’t meeting your goals, your policy may be the culprit.
Start by taking a look at the strategies and goals outlined in your policy. If they don’t align with your broader goals, that’s a fast way to account for lackluster performance. Also, take a look at the language of the policy itself – if it doesn’t clearly state performance standards, it can easily create confusion.
2. Look at Your Distribution of Responsibility
While you’re inspecting your environmental, health and safety policy, you should also take a look at how responsibility is distributed throughout your organization, alongside observations made in the everyday work environment.
Hint: if responsibility lies solely with your EHS team, you’re approaching environmental performance with the wrong mindset. Responsibility lies with the entire organization, and if your policy and day-to-day practices don’t reflect this, you’ll see the results in your overall environmental performance.
Spend some time with employees. Observe their work. Ask how they think about environmental responsibility and how that plays into their daily tasks. This will open the door for further dialogue about environmental performance across the organization.
3. Bolster Employee Involvement
It also leads into the third step, which is bolstering employee involvement.
As a safety professional, you already know that engaged employees are safe employees. These are the employees that show up to work aware of their surroundings, willing to pay attention to the small details and speak up when they see a problem.
Plus, the reality is that employees make up the bulk of your company. If they don’t see environmental performance as part of their responsibilities, most of the company is checked out.
The best place to start reinforcing employee involvement is through in-person dialogue and safety training. Safety talks on environmental performance are a great option here.
Taking Action with Steps to Improve Environmental Performance
These are by no means the only steps to improve environmental performance your organization should take, but they do offer a strong starting point.
After that, it pays to keep paying attention to the details of your performance and invest in the right tools for your success. That’s where we come in, with environmental management software designed to strengthen the companies of tomorrow. Want to see how our software can improve your performance? Get in touch today to learn more.
