How’s the transition going and what have you learned? 

Thanks to all of you in my network for your time and help over recent weeks. I’d like to share Volume 4 of my learnings from you with you.

Crisis management messaging

I completed additional webinars offered by the CDC last week and here’s what rang true to me: 

• empathy trumps sympathy
• crises begin and end at the local level
• promote positive action steps, as in saying ‘DO this’ vs. saying ‘Avoid / Don’t  do that’.

The highs and lows

I would love to hear your insights on where the bright spots are. A friend of mine was remarking this week about how companies in VC portfolios are at the extremes, with one business up 300% and another down 85% and many in-between. If your business is helping people find available parking in a congested city, for example, business is down… way down. On the other hand, the environmental services sector is very busy helping companies decontaminate workplaces where COVID-19 outbreaks occurred, or proactively cleaning spaces for return-to-work. If you did not have a master services agreement in place prior to the outbreak, you are likely paying a big premium for this service right now. 

Professional Development

With so many conferences and events cancelled, professional organizations are rapidly moving their events online. It remains to be seen how the appetite of attendees for content/learning shifts and how this will be monetized. One of my network colleagues at a professional association is scenario planning for scaled gatherings not being feasible until Fall 2021. 

Spinoffs and consolidations

Big business continues to restructure, exemplified by the massive Raytheon Technologies merge/spin on April 9th. The newly independent businesses, like Otis and Carrier now need to stand up their own governance processes, such as social responsibility reporting, while the merged entities are dealing with rationalizing and combining organizations, processes, and culture. And I was late to the news of Merck announcing the spinout of Organon & Co. planned for early 2021.  

Tech

I attended an NAEM Webinar on remote technology in EHS  this week, and especially liked the highlight on the Matterport Camera/3D Visualization suite. The presenters from Woodard and Curran highlighted how fast 3D modeling of your workspace could, for example,  help you quickly lay out social distancing constraints and options. I also stumbled across Bulletin Intelligence this week, while doing company research. Their company-specific executive briefing pages have a fresh look and feel… not too dense and easy to navigate. Finally,  no surprise: used Logitech webcams are going for 2-3X retail price on Amazon right now. Does anyone have a spare C920S I can bargain for? I bet there’s one in an empty office or IT department junk drawer somewhere!

For the EHS Pros

The AHMP Cyber chapter continues to provide great webinars on COVID-19, exemplified by excellent dialogue from 3 employment lawyers during their legal issues event held on April 9th.

In case you missed it, the National Safety Council’s Campbell Institute published their initial grant-funded ‘Work to Zero’ research report. It highlights which technologies show the most promise at reducing serious incidents and fatalities. 

I finished Sidney Dekker’s book ‘The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error’ this week and I am really looking forward to Tuesday’s HOPHub.org weekly discussion session. From concepts like the local rationality principle and ‘work as imagined vs. work as actually performed’, there is still so much more we can do as EHS professionals to promote this New View. How can we further help our organizations move away from the reactive blame game to a learning and resilience culture? 

We celebrated Earth Day this week and my hope is that the clean skies we see today can be sustained. Speaking recently with a senior sustainability professional in the chemical and materials sector, he summarized the mission: ‘You’ve fully integrated sustainability when no one has it on their business card… it’s a core value’. We both recognized it could be taken as a cliche, but it speaks to what we all aspire to as EHS&S professionals: building an embedded culture of protecting people, our communities and the planet.