How do you foster a culture of continuous improvement and innovation in your EMS?

To foster a culture of continuous improvement and innovation in your Environmental Management System (EMS), align it with your vision and values. Start by clearly defining your environmental goals and ensuring they reflect your core values. Engage your team by communicating the importance of these goals and how they align with the broader vision. Implement regular training and encourage open communication for sharing ideas and feedback. Recognize and reward innovative solutions, and use metrics to track progress. By embedding your vision and values into your EMS, you'll inspire ongoing commitment and creativity.

Para fomentar una cultura de mejora continua e innovación en nuestro Sistema de Gestión Ambiental (SGA), es fundamental alinear nuestro SGA con la visión y valores de nuestra organización. Nuestro SGA debe reflejar nuestra misión, visión y valores, así como alinearse con nuestros objetivos estratégicos y competencias básicas. Al comunicar de manera clara y consistente nuestros objetivos y políticas de EMS, creamos un sentido compartido de propósito y dirección entre empleados, clientes, proveedores y socios. Esto no solo inspira la contribución hacia nuestro desempe?o ambiental, sino que también promueve la innovación en nuestra organización

Ignite your EMS with these continuous improvement and innovation sparks: Align: Connect goals to the heart of your EMS and wider sustainability ambitions. Empower: Encourage experimentation, celebrate failures as learning opportunities. Data Dive: Harness data to identify improvement areas, track progress, and make informed decisions. Open Minded: Embrace new technologies, ideas, and partnerships for fresh perspectives. Transparency: Share results, best practices, and challenges to foster collaboration and learning. Recognition & Rewards: Celebrate successes, both big and small, to keep passion burning. Remember, a thriving EMS is a living ecosystem.

There is information on stakeholders in my textbook https://amzn.to/33klga3 See Chapter 9 "Engagement With Stakeholders and Social License to Operate." There is an entire chapter on this topic. The "web browser" mentioned above provides has information on stakeholders that is written at the right level so that everyone would be on the same page. This work is not overly simplified, but it does look at how the stakeholders themselves would interact with the EMS of different companies by focusing on the best ways to engage this important element of any EMS plan.

Involve your stakeholders—both internal and external—at every stage of the process. Gather their feedback, suggestions, and ideas through surveys, interviews, workshops, or focus groups. Include them in your environmental audits, reviews, and action plans. Engaging stakeholders builds trust, transparency, and collaboration, while also tapping into their diverse perspectives and expertise to enhance your EMS.

Implementar una cultura de excelencia operacional, que incluyan metas ambientales, sociales y de gobernanza, que impregnen la cultura organizacional es crítico. Fomentar una cultura de mejora continua e innovación en la cadena de suministros alrededor de la sostenibilidad y criterios ESG implica promover la sensibilización, establecer metas claras, crear un entorno que fomente la experimentación y la propuesta de nuevas ideas, y reconocer las contribuciones significativas hacia la sostenibilidad y los criterios ESG (Enviromental, Social, Governance). Esto integra la sostenibilidad en la estrategia empresarial y promueve un cambio positivo en la organización alrededor de la mejora contínua.

Each PDCA cycle in your EMS should begin with a clear hypothesis for both outputs and outcomes. Defining these expectations ensures targeted data collection and meaningful analysis. Treating each cycle as a small bet or experiment can vastly accelerate environmental progress. For example, a company that wants to implement a new waste reduction initiative across the whole organization can start with one team/division and hypothesize that the division actions will decrease landfill contributions by X%, disposal costs by Y%, and GHG contributions by Z%. By implementing, checking results, and adjusting based on findings, the organization can quickly refine practices and drive improvement before large-scale implementation.

ISO 14001:2015 has an excellent one-pager on Plan-Do-Check-Act for an EMS. You can find this information on the ISO public website browser and on the Internet. It is a very popular approach and works well for an EMS. It also allows sufficient customerization to enable companies of different maturities to share this general informaion with their suppliers and stakeholders. The ability to have an active program for implementing PDCA will be a great communications interface between stakeholders and the stakeholders and the organization using them. Even the regulators of environmental programs are widely familiar with PDCA.

It is important to entice all stakeholders (internal and external) to be involved in the appropriate activities mentioned in the above sections. In the book, Chapter 18 looks at "Sustainability Self-Assessment and Maturity. This involves both internal and external stakeholders. Chapter 19 in the book is "Improvement, Innovation and Learning. These are the areas where much of the learning and experimentation comes from. Chapter 20 in the book addresses "resilient organizations." Thiis is where the company is expected to excell. It provides the roles played by those leading and working for the organization. The second part looks at how this activity provides resilience in organizational performance management.

You can move beyond the efforts described above.Section The book provides information on Monitoring, Measureing and Improving Organizational Sustainability. The external stakeholders can also be a part of these programs. Chapter 9 looks at engagement with stakeholders so that the company can develop its "Social License to Operate." This is a very important process to make sure that the company is welcome in the community and is sincerely working with the company and the local officials that regulate to some extent how the organization can operate. This activity leads to recognition all the way around the internal and external stakeholders. You will note from chapter to chapter in my book how this is accomplished.

Para ser sostenibles y cumplir con los criterios ESG, se requiere de una red de colaboración no solo interna dentro de la organización, si no también externa. Solos no podemos con la complejidad y la exigencia del desafío no solo de ser sostenibles, si no de la regeneración.

The organization must pay attention to uncertainty assessment of its opportunities and threats. I have writen a short book, "How New Risk Management Helps Leaders Master Uncertainty." https://bit.ly/2K1o44 You are showing how the information in this topic can bring a great deal of harmony between the internal and external stakeholders. I suggest looking at the information in the two books and structure this section around these publications. Remember there is a third one comping real soon. I wrote a book on "Making the Business Case for EHS." It is out of print and I now own the rights to this material that I wrote for that work. The book is very practical and shows how to set up programs.

Establish Cross-Functional Green Teams for Long Term Evolution: In one of my previous client we formed cross-functional teams involving representatives from various departments to drive sustainability initiatives after EMS deployment. These teams identified opportunities, implemented changes, and monitored progress. This approach not only fostered collaboration but also ensured that sustainability efforts were integrated into diverse aspects of the organization, yielding comprehensive and impactful results.

Encourage a Mindset of Curiosity and Experimentation - Cultivate an environment where questioning the status quo is as natural as breathing. Encourage team members to view the EMS as a living entity, always evolving, much like a garden that thrives with constant care and new techniques. Integrate Cross-Functional Collaboration - Break down silos and foster a culture where ideas flow freely, like tributaries feeding into a great river. This approach ensures diverse perspectives are harnessed, enriching the EMS with innovative solutions born from a confluence of different experiences and expertise.