It goes by many names, including EHS and SHE in North America or HSE in Europe, but all work towards the same goal. Environment, Health, and Safety (EHS) regulatory compliance manages the rules, regulations, policies, programs, and training intended to prevent adverse impacts on the health and safety of workers and communities.
What Are EHS Regulations?
EHS regulations are the specific federal, state, and local rules that govern how organizations must protect worker health and safety and manage their impact on the environment. In the U.S., they primarily come from agencies like OSHA (workplace safety, including hazard communication and training requirements), the EPA (environmental protection), and DOT (transportation of hazardous materials), along with additional state and local regulatory requirements. Together, these regulations form the basis of an organization’s EHS compliance obligations.
Why EHS Compliance Is Important
Regulatory compliance isn’t just a legal and moral obligation to protect health and safety; it’s also good for business. A well-executed EHS compliance program can improve the bottom line in the following ways:
Avoid fines, penalties, and costly incidents: EHS non-compliance can be expensive, and according to the National Safety Council, the average workplace injury requiring medical attention costs employers around $44,000, while a workplace fatality costs $1.3 million. Those numbers include regulatory fines, increased insurance costs, lawyers fees, medical bills, disruptions to productivity, loss of reputations, and loss of future business.
A Positive Safety Culture and Reputation: People want to work for a company they respect, and that values them and their efforts. By putting worker safety first, organizations demonstrate to their employees that they care, which fosters a safe workplace and a strong culture that can support employee well-being, improve retention, and boost productivity. Accidents can hurt an organization’s reputation. Something that takes years to build can be destroyed instantly by a high-profile accident that brings negative media attention.
Commitment to people and environment: The most unfortunate result of companies failing to uphold their EHS responsibilities is the physical and emotional toll on workers and their families. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 5,190 fatal workplace injuries in the United States in 2021, many of which could have been preventable if employers had followed EHS regulations. In addition to protecting workers, EHS compliance programs also help organizations meet their environmental regulatory obligations. When these are neglected, the consequences can extend beyond the workplace—impacting surrounding communities and the environment as a whole.
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Common Types of EHS Regulations
EHS regulations generally fall into a few broad categories, and most organizations answer to more than one at the same time:
Occupational Health and Safety Regulations (OSHA)
In the United States, OSHA sets the baseline requirements for occupational health and safety — everything from hazard communication and personal protective equipment to recordkeeping and reporting of injuries and illnesses. Many states also operate their own OSHA-approved plans with requirements that go beyond the federal minimum.
Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) Regulations (EPA)
The EPA, or Environmental Protection Agency, regulates air emissions, wastewater discharge, hazardous waste management, and chemical storage and reporting under laws like the Toxic Substances Control Act, among other areas of environmental health and safety. Depending on your industry and location, state environmental agencies may layer on additional permitting and reporting requirements.
Transportation and Hazardous Materials Regulations (DOT)
Organizations that ship, store, or handle hazardous materials are also subject to DOT regulations governing labeling, packaging, and transport.
State and Local Regulatory Requirements
On top of federal requirements, state and local governments frequently introduce their own regulatory requirements — sometimes stricter, sometimes addressing risks federal rules don’t cover at all. This is one of the main reasons a one-size-fits-all compliance approach rarely works across multiple sites.
Understanding which of these regulatory categories actually apply to your organization is the necessary first step before any of the compliance practices below can be put into action.
EHS Compliance Checklist: The Keys to Regulatory Compliance
Whether you’re an EHS manager overseeing a single site or several, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all plan to maintain compliance, but there are a few fundamental steps companies can follow.
Identify applicable requirements: Complex requirements across industry, federal, state, and local levels can make this challenging, but identifying which ones apply to your organization and its processes is one of the most critical steps towards achieving compliance. Relevant regulations will vary and change as your business and processes evolve, so make sure your policies change with them.
Monitor regulatory changes: Regulators often create, eliminate, or modify current regulations, and enforcement actions for non-compliance can range from fines to, in serious cases, criminal enforcement actions. EHS compliance is dynamic, and the rules change as new information and best practices develop. Companies that want to maintain regulatory compliance must keep their eyes open for changes affecting their operations. Staying proactive by tracking changes in your industry and measuring your Regulatory Preparedness is the best way to do this. Also, make sure to communicate changes to workers. If you miss this crucial step, internal policies and procedures may change on paper, but your workers are performing tasks out of compliance.
Create an EHS compliance calendar: A compliance calendar helps organizations stay on top of compliance by consolidating and tracking all their regulatory obligations, permits, reporting deadlines, and information in one place. It centralizes the process, which means you’ll forget fewer obligations and reduce your company’s likelihood of non-compliance. In addition, an EHS compliance calendar lets you know what’s coming, giving you adequate time to plan, collect what you need, and be ready when the deadline arrives.
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Conduct regular audits and inspections: You can’t fix what you don’t know about. That’s why regularly conducting workplace audits and inspections is important for EHS compliance. Identifying potential risks and fixing them before they have the chance to result in an accident or injury is the best way to be proactive with workplace safety. The difference between a poor or average safety record and an excellent one often comes down to proactivity. The top performers are not waiting for accidents to happen; they are taking steps to prevent them. Also, ensure that you track all audit findings because they can provide valuable information about EHS trends that you may not be aware of.
Track and investigate incidents and issues: Getting to the bottom of an accident or a near miss is one of the best ways to prevent reoccurrence. Digitally tracking incident findings can give you valuable insight and help you identify trends that may help you identify gaps in your safety program and where additional focus and training may be needed.
Implement and track corrective actions: Identifying issues isn’t enough; someone needs to fix them. By creating action items and following them to completion, the organization can be sure things are fixed. This also gives you insight into your company’s compliance because you can see what has been improved and is overdue, helping you focus your attention where it’s needed most.
EHS Training for Employees
Employees trained on how to identify and mitigate hazards in their workplace are less likely to be injured. If no one has taught us, we are more likely to be blind to the dangers in our environments. Companies must adhere to mandatory training requirements, but providing additional training relevant to the workplace and environment is a good idea. Update training as regulations and conditions change, and refresh employees on training as needed.
Maintain records and document regulatory obligations: If you didn’t document it, it didn’t happen. For example, if you performed a class on bloodborne pathogens, but did not have a roster and collect signatures, how can a regulator be sure the course occurred? They will not take your word for it; they want proof—document everything.
Record EHS events and report to agencies: EHS incident reporting and recording requirements will depend on your organization, but let’s use OSHA as an example. OSHA wants to know about serious, recordable, work-related injuries and illnesses and must be notified within 8 hours of any work-related fatality and within 24 hours for an inpatient hospitalization, amputation, or the loss of an eye. If your company has had a workplace accident and classified it as recordable, then the next step is to record the incident on OSHA Forms 301 and 300 log. Finally, Form 300A summarizes recordable injuries or illnesses that occurred during the year and must be submitted to OSHA by March 2nd.
Using EHS Management Systems to Support Your Compliance Program
Effective EHS management depends on more than good intentions — it requires management systems that keep pace with changing regulatory requirements. Managing EHS compliance and all the documentation it entails can be a considerable undertaking. Thankfully, EHS software can make things more efficient by digitizing your EHS processes and centralizing your regulatory obligations, tasks, audits, and related information. Unfortunately, the efficiencies gained from software can quickly be offset if our teams are spending too much time just keeping the system up-to-date as regulations and your operational footprint change.
That’s where Dakota Software comes in. Our EHS management software products include a fully integrated regulatory database that is maintained by our team of in-house experts. Not only can this database help your site leaders identify and outline their regulatory obligations, it can ensure that they are always aware of the regulatory updates that apply to them.
EHS compliance isn’t a one-time project — it’s an exercise in continuous improvement as regulations, operations, and risks evolve. Take a tour of our EHS EHS compliance planning solution for more information on how Dakota can help you achieve and maintain EHS regulatory compliance.
