Connect

« Back

Post Pandemic Resilience

April 5th, 2021 by Jackie Baxley

There is not a single industry or workplace that did not feel the strain caused by the pandemic.  For some, it was the strain of working from home, layoffs, and illness.  For others, it was stress on your supply chain, manufacturing retrofits into producing essential products, or balancing the health and safety of your essential workers.

On top of all this, we’ve observed that Environmental Health and Safety (EH&S) programs have also suffered. 

EH&S compliance relies on:

• Knowledge of the compliance obligation,
• Programs to facilitate compliance (such as written procedures, training, and communication),
• Audits and inspections to continually assess compliance, and
• Actions to correct gaps and prevent recurrence.

Knowledge was lost as individuals were laid off, left the workplace ,or  were diverted elsewhere.  Programs lapsed as training and communication was suspended due to social distancing and gathering restrictions.  Audits and inspections were missed because of the strain of time and resources from the pandemic.  The sum of all these challenges allowed compliance gaps to go unaddressed.

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel! There will be a time when workers are vaccinated, when we can safely gather, when we can begin picking up the pieces. The question is how do we build a post-pandemic resilience into our EH&S programs?

1. Conduct an audit to identify your compliance gaps
2. Fill those gaps and identify why did those gaps occurred (i.e., root cause)
3. Develop prevention solutions that significantly reduce those root causes

The easy way out is to just blame the pandemic as the root cause.  But make this a mirror moment and look deeper.  Did you have only one person assigned to a critical program?  Were key documents and records only available as a hard copy and not available on a shared network for personnel to access?  Was there a compliance calendar in place so several layers of management could have visibility of key milestones and deadlines?

In the coming weeks, HRP will be sharing our knowledge and experiences to further support your post-pandemic resiliency efforts. We will release a podcast that poses the question of whether you should disclose compliance gaps to governmental agencies.  We will release a complementary webinar series on compliance obligations that the regulated community struggles with in both the best of times and the worst of times. Check out our YouTube channel for more content in support of this knowledge sharing. 

As the pandemic draws to a close, it’s time to ask yourself, do we have the resiliency to take the next steps? HRP is here to help you move your EHS program forward.

---

Jackie S. Baxley, PE, EHS Practice Leader at HRP Associates, Inc.