On May 4th, 2022, Origami presented “Your Organization’s EHS Maturity – Where Do You Stand?” in partnership with EHS Today. During this webinar, Roger Audino, EHS Practice Lead at Origami Risk, addressed the following questions:

• Why evaluate your EHS maturity? How can the EHS Maturity Assessment help?
• What are my peers doing?
• Where can I go from here?

Why evaluate your EHS maturity? What is the EHS maturity assessment and how can it help?

In order to know where to go, you have to know where you are today. Evaluating your EHS maturity can help you better understand your baseline and plan to get to the next level even more quickly and efficiently.

Origami built and designed the EHS maturity assessment based on decades of combined EHS experience of members of our team and conversations with many clients. The assessment is a 17 question survey that takes less than 10 minutes to finish.  Upon completion, respondents receive tailored output and suggested next steps based on where their EHS maturity falls. 

Respondents fall into category outputs on a 2x2 chart, that visually represent the type and level of safety culture maturity and technology maturity on a low-to-high basis. 

What are my peers doing?

To date, a majority of survey respondents have a variety EHS titles and work at companies in the manufacturing, transportation, and construction industries with 1000+ employees. Respondents (>80%) indicate that their organizations have incident reporting, investigations, safety trainings, safety meetings, and audits/inspections programs in place. There is, however, a drop off in the percentage of respondents indicating that their organizations are doing near misses, process safety management, and behavior based safety.

Another key result is that 41% of respondents replied that they are using paper or spreadsheets as their primary tools for managing their EHS program —  an interesting data point given the number of safety professionals at large companies in high-risk industries who replied to the survey.

Very few respondents (23%) indicate that they are using automated workflows to manage corrective actions and other action items. This is surprising because 48% of respondents were already primarily using third-party software to manage their EHS program. This represents a very strong opportunity for organizations to put in place automated workflows and notifications to ensure corrective actions are actually completed and that stakeholders spend less time on email and paper communications. Another side effect of your communications not being adequately tracked is that employees may become discouraged when their suggestions to make the workplace safer may fall through the cracks, meaning that their suggestions are not implemented. This is one example of how technology can impact safety culture.

Slightly more than half (57%) of respondents are using mobile in their EHS program. This represents another major opportunity for EHS professionals to use technology to disrupt safety programs — in part because employees can report incidents and conduct audits from the field, in near real-time, without waiting until they can return to their desk, thus reducing the potential for forgetting  details or even completing the report at all.

Additionally, less than half reported that all employees in their organizations have access to incident reporting technology. Giving all employees access to incident reporting technology is another opportunity to increase engagement and reporting.

35% of respondents fall into the Advanced category, 13% into Process Oriented, 27% into Values Oriented, and 25% into Emerging. The Advanced category has the greatest number of respondents. This is not surprising if one considers the size of a majority of respondents’ organizations and their industries. 

Where can I go from here?

Regardless of where organizations stand, there are a number of actions that can help to advance the maturity level of EHS programs:

• Forming a cross-functional committee that draws from departments such as HR, operations, and engineering to help secure budgeting, engage executives, and increase EHS performance
• Participating in industry networking events — ASSP, NSC, SLC, and vendor user groups, to name just a few — to learn best practices and exchange ideas with peers
• Leveraging technology solutions to draw actionable insights from your safety data
• Reframing EHS as part of your organization’s core mission, vision, and values

To learn about what maturity category you fall into and potential next steps your organization can take to mature your EHS program, watch the webinar replay or take the EHS Maturity Assessment.