Using Business Metrics and Leading Indicators of EHS Performance – translating EHS into business benefit

Rankin, Kristyn
(ERM, Austin, Texas)

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Leading a corporate environmental, health and safety (EHS) program is a unique opportunity. EHS leaders can play a major role in corporate governance, business performance, and aligning the corporation with society’s expectations. This is often a daunting role. Corporate EHS leaders face some challenges shared by most corporate executives. Two of these challenges are driving continued performance improvement and proving the value of their organization to the overall business. Achieving these objectives from an EHS organization perspective is significantly facilitated by using certain non-EHS business metrics (accounting, human resources, facilities, production, etc.) that a company is already using to monitor the health of the business as leading indicators of EHS performance. Once these are identified, the EHS manager has a “dash board” of leading metrics to monitor EHS performance instead of relying on traditional lagging indicators. Linking EHS performance to traditional business metrics also clearly illustrates the impacts of EHS performance on the business. This paper will describe the process for identifying appropriate metrics for a given business and for efficiently using them to monitor EHS performance and to illustrate the value of EHS to the financial health of the business.

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