Go to any EHS conference or read any EHS publication, and you are guaranteed to hear about “safety culture”. It’s probably on the top of your mind as an EHS professional, and advancing your safety culture is likely one of your top priorities to help your team to proactively identify risk and hazards to reduce incidents and injuries.

But how do you know where your organization’s safety culture stands? While everyone in the practice talks about the importance of a transparent safety culture, but how do they diagnose the maturity of their safety culture at their organization? And how do they then determine concrete next steps to improve it?

Introducing the EHS Maturity Assessment

In an effort to help EHS professionals to answer this growing question, the Origami EHS team developed the EHS Maturity Assessment to do just that. Not only does this assessment tool grade your safety culture maturity, it also grades your technology maturity, which is beneficial to establishing processes to run a more efficient and effective EHS program.

The assessment places respondents into 4 categories based on their answers to 17 multiple choice questions.

But first, it’s important to understand what it takes to define safety culture maturity and technology maturity.

Defining Safety Culture Maturity

In general, companies with higher safety culture maturity are using tools in their program to promote transparent communication, like safety meetings. They also encourage or even incentivize reporting of incidents and near misses – and take steps to put controls in place to reduce hazards and risks before they occur. These organizations are more likely to have C-Suite buy-in to EHS initiatives and promote safety as a core value. Conversely, companies with lower safety culture maturity are more likely to be reactive and treat safety as a compliance exercise.

View the on-demand Webinar: Your Organization’s EHS Maturity –  Where do you stand?

Defining Technology Maturity

Technology systems vary from organization to organization. Lower maturity companies are still using paper and spreadsheets to manage their EHS program, which quickly becomes burdensome from an administrative perspective, along with the risk of important corrective actions and tasks falling through the cracks. More advanced companies may use a single system to manage their EHS program across the organization and use tools like mobile technology.

How the EHS Maturity Assessment Can Help

After filling out the assessment, each respondent receives a customized output detailing:

• Where their EHS maturity falls within the above four categories
• Specific next steps to take in order to mature their culture and program
• Resources they can leverage to improve that maturity (e.g. ways to advocate for executive buy-in, a framework to evaluate potential technology partners)

Excerpt of an example output of the EHS Maturity Assessment framework.

One of the biggest things we hear from Origami clients is that they would like to benchmark their organization against their peers. Along with the PDF results of the assessment, respondents can also register for our upcoming webinar on May 4, in which Roger Audino, EHS Practice Lead, will be reviewing assessment benchmark data as a whole to give further insight into where your peers stand.

Interested in taking the Origami Risk EHS Maturity Assessment? Click here to take the 17-question assessment in under 10 minutes.