Over the past few decades, the world has seen a significant shift in how people view the environment, health, businesses, and employee well-being. In today's climate, every industry is increasingly encouraged to invest in workplace health and safety management and minimize its environmental impact.
EHS management involves managing risks, protecting workers and businesses, and ensuring sustainable business growth. In a global context, EHS management refers to the long-term sustainable development of industries. Unfortunately, ensuring health, safety, and environmental consciousness can be challenging, with countless aspects to consider and address.
This is where EHS comes in—a set of procedures designed to allow businesses to implement procedures to secure the overall well-being of their employees, businesses, communities, and the plant. This article examines EHS's meaning, benefits, and role in maintaining workplace safety.
What is EHS?
EHS stands for Environment, Health, and Safety. This discipline revolves around protecting the health and safety of humans in the workplace, minimizing hazards, and ensuring the safety of communities and environments worldwide.
The process includes identifying and assessing potential risks, carrying out safety protocols, and ensuring companies comply with safety regulations. EHS's full form in safety includes preventing injuries, illnesses, and accidents and reducing pollution and excessive waste.
The acronym can be broken down into the following:
1. Environment
This portion of EHS concerns the environment. It essentially covers chemical spills, excessive waste production, air or water pollution, and other hazards, as well as how to mitigate the possibility of these occurring.
2. Health
This aspect of EHS deals with factors that could make people ill, such as excessive exposure to chemicals, radiation, pathogens, pollution, and more. Its goal is to ensure the safety and health of the people involved in your company's operations.
3. Safety
Last but not least is safety. It is associated with workplace injuries or accidents and mitigating the risk of their occurrence.
Each aspect of EHS can pose unique threats and challenges, and addressing them will depend on each company's industry and specific requirements.
How Does EHS Improve Workplace Safety?
The importance of EHS in business cannot be understated. Some reasons why it is critical in the workplace include:
- Helping employees avoid injury, illness, or other bodily harm.
- Avoiding exposure to harmful substances.
- Ensuring compliance with OSHA, ISO, and other international regulations and standards.
- Avoiding accidents and the penalties, litigation, and fines they bring with them.
- Avoiding cleanup costs in case of biohazards, costly oil or chemical spills, and more.
- Creating a safe, healthy, and more supportive work environment for employees.
EHS oversees and implements procedures and policies to ensure environmental regulations are adhered to, workplace safety is prioritized, and any potential hazards are identified, controlled, and mitigated. These are only some reasons why EHS is vital for any industry. But how can EHS be implemented? This is where EHS management systems and software come in. They aid companies in complying with international regulations, ensuring safety, health, and sound environmental practices, among other benefits.
What Are the Benefits of EHS?
Investing in EHS management and a sound EHS management system comes with countless benefits, including tracking and assessing your EHS challenges, improving your performance, and creating a better workplace environment for employees. Some of the main advantages of EHS include:
1. Reducing Hazards
The first and perhaps most important aspect of EHS is reducing hazards and minimizing danger. EHS management software allows you to better understand your risk profile, incident reports, and other data. Thus, you can assess risks more efficiently, detect potential problems early on, and prevent disasters, injuries, health issues, and more.
2. Enhancing Performance
A healthy, happy workplace is also a more productive one. Today, there is an increased perception of businesses prioritizing profit over well-being, which can cause employees to feel burnt out and unsupported. Investing in a strong EHS management system and ensuring employee health and well-being can lead to fewer injuries and illnesses, better productivity, and increased morale.
Additionally, excessive workplace illnesses and injuries lead to more sick leave payments, lower productivity, and higher costs in the long run. In fact, studies have shown that countries like Denmark and Finland, which invest more in occupational safety and health, also fare better in global markets.
3. Maintaining Corporate Responsibility
Corporate social responsibility, or CSR, refers to implementing business strategies that take socialism, economic, and environmental impacts of their actions into account.
EHS systems play a significant role in maintaining corporate social responsibility by ensuring employees' social, mental, and physical well-being. This is crucial for contributing to social well-being and ethical conduct. It involves complying with global health and safety, international standards, and accounting for stakeholder expectations.
4. Streamlining Documentation
Investing in EHS management gives you access to detailed documentation modules that allow you to approve, control, and manage your records for your EMS management system. All documents concerning ISO standards (like ISO 14001) can be stored centrally, ensuring easier access.
This also ensures companies have access to the latest versions of their documents. These steps ensure that your workflows and procedures are more streamlined. Centralized documentation also provides more consistency in data collection, allowing for transparency and better decision-making.
5. Improving Efficiency and Compliance
EHS management systems can help streamline and organize reporting processes, improving data collection accuracy. Automating these workflows can also help businesses comply with ISO and OSHA regulations by reducing human error and enhancing overall environmental performance.
Are EHS And HSE The Same Thing?
It is important to note that EHS and HSE (Health, Safety, and Environment), while often used interchangeably, differ in minute ways. This depends on the context in which they are being used. HSE generally refers to more broadly managing health, safety, and environmental concerns.
On the other hand, EHS focuses more on the intersection of environmental factors and health and safety considerations. To put it simply, it is a multidisciplinary field. Both focus on similar aspects of managing a business and are equally important.
The Bottom Line
Environment, Health, and Safety are central aspects to consider when outlining your business operations. To summarize, they ensure the health and safety of your employees, the productivity and scalability of your operations, prevent environmental disasters, and much more.
Investing in capable and efficient EHS software is a significant part of ensuring your company meets standards. If you are looking for a way to improve EHS for your business, consider Effivity. Our Health and Safety Management Software is easy to set up and integrate with your existing systems, offers round-the-clock support, and is a low-cost way to maintain health and safety.
Our software has been carefully created by occupational health and safety specialists and is designed to deliver high-quality results to businesses in any industry and size. It ensures more efficient processing, ease of communication, and automated monitoring, provides real-time data and leads to fewer incidents and a safer working environment.
To learn more, visit Effivity's website today!
