Business Resiliency Strategies: Compliance through Innovative Partnerships
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April 25, 2022 - Managing environmental compliance requirements can be tricky, especially now that federal, state, and local regulatory entities are rapidly modifying and introducing new statutes, resuming or increasing compliance inspections, and stiffening penalties for failure to comply. When coupling more stringent requirements with an industry-wide shortage of environmental professionals, environmental compliance program management often grows beyond the capacity of an organization’s internal capabilities, and the need to bring in outside help becomes a reality. Building a relationship with a strategic partner that understands how to harness innovations to monitor, access, and execute compliance programs can save your organization both time and money while preserving brand integrity. The goal of a strategic partner is to understand the organization’s eccentricities, know both the efficiencies and synergies attainable through innovation, and share the burden of finding, building, and embedding customized solutions. Because of the separation from the rigors and chaos inherent within the operations of a business, a strategic partner can often aid in providing both visibility and clarity to compliance obligations, ultimately enabling the organization to better prepare for changes in regulatory mandates. This is increasingly more important in today’s economic conditions that are fueling both growth and contraction in businesses.
Common Innovation Pitfalls
Concentrate on keeping your innovation team size limited, as innovating is not an easy task. Innovating inspires creativity, and often creativity leads to a flood of ideas, but allowing too much input can shut an innovation down before it comes to fruition. During the background research phase, firmly establish the final goal. Considerations with innovation abound; third-party integrations, legal reviews, location-specific regulatory differences, and business environmental and sustainability initiatives are just a few areas that need to be considered. As there are a lot of hurdles to overcome, it is best to identify them from the start to keep everyone focused on the outcome, or else the entire process can derail. The last thing you want to do is leverage a fantastic piece of technology only to find out it doesn’t integrate well with your current infrastructure, adds legal complexity, or doesn’t support pertinent business initiatives.
Pilot Program
Sometimes ideas look really good on paper, right? But even the best-thought-out ideas often don't translate into the workplace like we think. Running a controlled pilot program is essential to the success of innovations, as they allow for testing of how well the innovative solution performs in the real world, often bringing to light challenges to scaling the innovation, and identifying any gaps such as data capturing and field usability of the innovation. Seldom has a product remained exactly as it was designed from the desktop through wide-scale implementation. Be flexible, ready to make lots of adjustments, and use pilot programs to guide your path to integration of an innovation.
Project Recap
When a solution has been identified and is underway, that shouldn’t be the end of the partnership. A lot of people don't allocate the time to complete a thorough project recap, and they lose the opportunity to parlay those experiences into improving the next project. Larger initiatives requiring a significant investment upfront tend to get most of the attention from start to finish. But don’t ignore your smaller initiatives as those can often lead to unexpected larger solutions. Take some time to look back and think about each project as a whole. Did this project offer impact the way it was intended? Was it as successful as planned and what were the successes? Were there any shortfalls? What was the largest hurdle in the process? What are long-term monitoring plans?
Innovative partnerships can be the bridge between environmental compliance problems and solutions. Innovations can provide both efficiencies and synergies in compliance programs. Partnerships with consultants often make innovations more successful by allowing creativity to rule, through fostering collaborative efforts that focus on the challenges an organization faces coupled with third-party solutions, and by offering an outside perspective that has been privy to numerous best practices and honed by a variety of experiences.
Follow along with our Environmental Business Resiliency Strategies series for more insight intended to provoke deeper thought on environmental compliance.
