Gabriele Crognale

Are your people on the bandwagon when it comes to building and main-taining an effective environmental management program? If you expect this initiative to be a success at your facility, their understanding and buy-in is essential. And here is how to get it.

Talk to front-line workers about the additional hoops they need to jump through as a means to attain a certain plateau in the business, and you’re as likely to be met with groans of protest as by nods of ap-proval. Why is that? Many workers attribute their lukewarm response to previous management attempts to roll out the latest “fad of the month” that’s supposed to “solve all of our problems.”

Many of those initiatives were not so much “fads,” however, as good ideas that were improperly intro-duced and inadequately supported. So what’s different about ISO 14001 that may be of benefit to front-line workers and actually help them perform more efficiently?

Benefits to Workers

Let’s look more closely at some of the benefits that front line workers could attain if their organizations were to embrace a comprehensive environmental management program (EMS) that conforms to ISO 14001 — and that provides opportunities for employee health and safety issues to be identified and addressed.

Use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)

Workers may need to handle chemicals or other materials that are hazardous. While the use of PPE, coupled with refer-ring to material safety data sheets (MSDSs), is normally required to under OSHA’s Hazcom standard — §1910.1200 — it’s not all that un-common for employees to fail to refer to MSDSs or to don the ap-propriate PPE.

Where does ISO come into play here? Again, with an EMS in place that includes comprehensive ISO procedures, such procedures would identify:

The benefits: a decreased likeli-hood of chemicals being spilled due to inappropriate handling and a decreased likelihood of an employee being injured or worse.

Increased Efficiency

As an over-all consideration, having a front-line worker’s job responsibilities linked to a structured program as described in an EMS and adhered to (the “do-as-you-say-and-say-as-you-do” method) generally leads to more consistent compliance when it comes to workers performing their duties.

If workers have a clear understanding of what is required of them as part of their job descriptions — and if they are given the tools (including speci-alized training) that go with their work responsibilities, it stands to reason that they will be better in-formed and more likely to perform in a manner that complements their assignments.

Part and parcel of that improved performance is a decrease in the possibility of harming them-selves or others around them, mini-mizing the generation of waste prod-uct or waste materials that may need to be properly managed, and a sense of accomplishment in so doing.

These benefits and more can be realized by incorporating these considerations into your facility’s EMS and, hence, into specific ISO 14001 procedures that address these situations.