Why Hire an EHS Consultant?
EHS (Environmental, Health and Safety) rules and regulations are designed to protect your workers and the public. Compliance is a commitment to your employees that you’ll keep them as safe as possible, and promise to treat the environment responsibly. It’s also a legal obligation. Businesses that fail to meet EHS standards for their industry face punitive measures and, potentially, lasting bad press.
The right EHS consultant will provide a detailed roadmap for you on how to meet the compliance regulations that apply to your business. With approximately 5,000 revisions to EHS requirements annually, they’ll also help you understand how best to stay informed about code changes, upcoming rulemaking, and industry best practices.
A good EHS consultant will be honest and straight to the point with you. There may be threats and hazards within your workplace that you need to know about and address in a timely manner. These concerns can’t be sugar coated, as might be the case with an internal team member tasked with identifying and classifying compliance faults or risks.
Why Your Business is Struggling to Find the Right EHS Consultant
Hiring a competent EHS consultant is essential to the success of your business, but it doesn’t often feel simple. Many struggle to prioritize their EHS compliance in relation to other business matters, or to find the best EHS professionals for their specific industry. Many businesses have:
- No idea what standards they should audit to
- Delegated safety to a person without safety experience or aptitude
- No safety budget or idea of what safety expenses are already incurred
If this has happened to your company, keep reading. These are the main reasons businesses don’t manage to employ the right EHS services to bring their work environment and employees up to speed:
You Don’t Have Prior Experience With EHS Consulting or EHS Audits
EHS isn’t usually a stated priority at many companies. We can grasp the need for EHS, but it still gets pushed to the side in the busy day-to-day of running a business.
Maybe your business has been non-compliant for a long time. Perhaps a business partner or stakeholder wants to dig into your safety programs more deeply. Or maybe you’ve simply had a wake-up call and decided it’s time to get your EHS compliance in order.
There are around 100,000 EHS requirements that can result in a citation or fine under US federal law. Knowing where to start to be compliant and avoid penalties can feel confusing and completely overwhelming.
EHS professionals specialize in specific industries and build the experience they need to thrive in them. You need to sort through a variety of resumes when it comes to quality consultants.
One easy and dependable solution is Yellowbird. Our platform matches companies with top-tier EHS professionals to help in all industries — but we’ll circle back to this later
You’re Trying to Offload the Job Onto an Existing Employee
It can be tempting to push the job of EHS compliance and auditing onto an existing team member who has some type of safety title or accreditation. Often in the absence of a dedicated safety professional, EHS responsibilities are placed on operations managers or human resources professionals who are already overwhelmed with their usual duties. EHS compliance is a highly specialized field with its own knowledge base. It can’t be properly attended to by just anyone.
In fact, an existing employee is likely to struggle to make sense of all the compliance regulations and codes. Just as we hire a lawyer to help us make sense of the law, we need EHS professionals to deal with regulations effectively.
On top of this, it’s usually difficult to spot your own company’s needs and faults when you work in the same environment every day. An external EHS consultant, on the other hand, will bring fresh eyes and industry expertise to your workplace.
Instead of handing them responsibilities outside of their skill set, you’ll need to get your existing employees on board after you’ve engaged an EHS consultant. A fully competent EHS professional will help you build and maintain systems for an excellent safety culture in your workplace. One way they’ll do this is by making sure all employees understand their role in workplace safety and have the skills and knowledge they need to work in a manner that promotes safety and accountability.
You’re Not Dedicating Proper Financial Capital
Putting yourself and your company in the safest environment, while fully meeting regulatory requirements, is a lot of work. It also asks for a certain level of financial investment that’s hard to ignore. This includes hiring an EHS consultant to audit your company frequently and continually evaluate its performance. That’s an ongoing expense for the business.
Understandably, you might be inclined to hire EHS services that charge rock-bottom prices. There’s only one reason a professional services firm charges so little -you’re likely to end up signing with an inexperienced EHS firm or professional that can’t get your business up to full compliance. These low budget firms deploy the use of generic template approaches, not the customized approach your business needs to achieve EHS excellence.
Finding a qualified EHS consultant requires a dedicated plan and allocation of money. Don’t leave it at the bottom of the priority pile and use what spare cash is in the yearly budget.
Despite the expense, investing in an EHS professional to help you reach full compliance with EHS regulations is far more cost-effective than the alternative. The financial bar for proper safety is lower than the bar for workplace incidents, injuries, and regulatory citations. Besides the ethical considerations, no business owner wants to face costly insurance claims for workplace injuries or even death. By investing in quality EHS consultants, you put that money back into your employees and business as a whole.
Introducing the Yellowbird Platform
Need to know where to start with this crucial investment? Don’t waste time looking for an EHS consultant on your own, let Yellowbird help you out. We match companies with EHS professionals that specialize in a wide variety of industries.
After registering on our platform, simply post a project you need to fill, including the skills and certifications you require. We’ll match you with the right EHS professional from our network for your needs. We’ll also handle scheduling, communication, billing, and payment, taking the hard work out of dealing with your EHS regulations once and for all.
