While Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) and Sustainability can feel as if it has skyrocketed onto the scene as quickly as the latest viral TikTok video has onto our tween’s screens, the foundation of ESG and Sustainability has been at the forefront of every health, safety and environmental(HSE) professional’s mind for the entirety of their careers. Providing a healthy and safe workplace, community, and environment is the heart of sustainability. Employee and contractor safety are the literal heartbeat of an organization’s ESG performance and completely core to any sustainable business endeavor. The market’s increasing emphasis on sustainability creates an opportunity for organizations to evolve beyond even traditional regulatory requirements and become a truly transformative force for the planet and the communities where we work and play. It’s time for us to think bigger about the roles that safety and sustainability play in our lives.
Sustainable growth for any business centers on understanding and considering both the positive and potential negative effects its operations can have on social, economic, and ecological issues. At its heart, effective ESG strategies are structured to assess risks and subsequently implement a mitigation strategy: avoid, minimize, restore, and/or offset. To identify areas for sustainability integration, as well as reporting, companies are deploying thoughtful and engaged materiality assessments to highlight issues that are important for both the company and its stakeholders. These assessments include surveys and interviews with internal and external parties. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) states, “Material issues are ones that can reasonably be considered important for reflecting the organization’s economic, environmental and social impacts, or influencing the decisions of stakeholders.”
Without a doubt, the health and safety of employees, contractors, visitors, and the community is paramount to a robust safety culture and consistently shows up in these materiality assessments. While the focus on human health must continue to be unwavering, we also must examine what safety looks like from an environmental and organizational perspective. In other words, in addition to the injuries that we want to prevent ,what are the adverse outcomes we want to avoid?
Operators are continuing to set higher standards for conducting their business in a manner that is environmentally safe and have made significant progress across many areas including emission reductions, waste minimization, water conservation/recycling, and responsible resource allocation. Sustainability professionals and responsible companies have been able to create awareness and establish a core vision, achieving results through investment in innovations and transparency.
As companies grow to understand ESG, organizations increasingly recognize ‘environment sustainability’ and ‘social sustainability’ as partners relying on one another to achieve success rather than as two different, competing objectives. Unifying the focus minimizes the risks of unintended negative impacts to safety cultures and decreases risk of competition between environmental and social goals.
To keep safety at the heart of sustainability and to link the associated processes and systems, we must first have a quick look at the things that constrain success:
- Safety is in a silo – not well linked with sustainability performance.
- Failing to establish a vision and tactical objectives for achieving both safety and sustainability.
- Corporate cultures primarily focused on tactical issues of recordkeeping, incident reporting, personal protective equipment, and other elements that, while necessary, do not yield long-term strategic initiatives.
When an organization makes safety a value, they have the cornerstone for linking sustainability to it. The following recommendations help organizations enhance performance and improve operational systems to drive the dynamic partnership of safety and sustainability:
Team Work
Sustainability is about resiliency, and nothing builds resiliency like a team of people who understand the goal and are empowered to achieve that goal collectively. Team empowerment involves establishing a culture where failure can happen safely so that innovation can thrive. It also requires an environment where different strengths are understood and leveraged for the group’s success, and weaknesses are viewed as opportunities for developmental investment and support. Leaders should work to sniff out and remove roadblocks to the team’s collective success meeting sustainability goals.
Management Support
Management should think broadly and recognize the strategic ways they can engage with teams to drive supportive energy into safety and sustainability initiatives. Celebrating successes and encouraging teams after failures are fundamental in driving the lasting and energetic engagement needed from everyone to deliver high value projects that drive sustainability into the business.
Integrating reliable metrics
A critical component of any organization’s sustainability journey is consistent and reliable metrics. In a culture of sustainability, everyone understands that what is important is measured and what is measured gets done. Without integrating consistent and reliable metrics into sustainability strategies, any discussion about workplace and environmental safety is futile. A balance of lagging and leading key indicators will not only help keep progress trending in a positive direction, but it will also keep safety at the core of sustainability.
I believe that if we are willing to see safety (both human and environmental)as the primary drivers of sustainable business strategies, then the TikTok viewers in our lives will have healthier workplaces and communities within which to live and thrive. To me, that is the heart of sustainability.
