Advancing EHS Performance with Data, Culture and Cross-Functional Partnership

Jason Johantges, Director, Environmental, Health and Safety, the Scotts Miracle-Gro Company

Jason Johantges began his career as an engineer for a construction project management company, where he was responsible for overseeing environmental, health and safety compliance on construction job sites. Enjoying the inspections, training and development of safety and environmental systems, he chose to pursue a dedicated path in EHS. He went onto work for corporations building EHS programs before joining Scotts Miracle-Gro in 2008. Starting with Scottslawn Service, the company’s at-home lawn care division, he has since worked with every business unit from sales, supply chain, R&D, Centers of Excellence and Hydroponics group. These experiences led to his current role leading the Field Operations EHS team, which supports the sales, supply chain, R&D and distribution organizations.

Collaborative Regulatory Vigilance

We have a great team from our Centers of Excellence, Legal, Risk and field EHS teams that regularly review releases, go to webinars or in-person conferences and utilize both free and paid subscriptions that help keep us informed of the evolving environmental and regulatory expectations. We all share information and help make decisions on if and how we need to comply with regulatory changes. It’s a great cross-functional team that stays engaged with one another.

Measuring Proactive Tech Impact

Determining whether a new EHS technology meaningfully improves outcomes or simply adds complexity is not easy to quantify. We gave key performance indicators (KPI’s) that focus on proactive actions and things we can control. When we introduce new technologies, we measure their impact on one of the key indicators aligned with the technology adopted. We do not, yet, have a technology specific KPI. I’d love to hear from anyone that has created and adopted one. We are fortunate to have an EHS Technology and Data Analytics team, who are exploring similar opportunities for KPI’s.

The most promising opportunities for technology to elevate performance are in improving operational efficiency and workforce education, including advanced training methods such as classroom learning, virtual reality and on-the-job training along with inspections and incident data analysis with predictive abilities.

Elevating EHS Performance

The most promising opportunities for technology to elevate EHS performance are in improving operational efficiency and workforce education. This includes advanced training methods such as classroom learning, virtual reality and on-the-job training along with inspections and incident data analysis that has predictive abilities. I’m really excited for true predictive analytics that can tell who, what, where, when and why our next incident will be with real confidence.

Philosophy of Freedom to Operate

I consider our job to be “Freedom to Operate”. We align with our business partners to reach our company goals by focusing on things that would greatly hinder our operations, or potentially shut them down. Freedom to operate means focus on compliance to prevent shutdowns of operations from regulators or heavy fines that would impact financial performance, and also focus on things that would cause harm to the safety and environment of our associates and facilities like spills, explosions, serious incidents and fatalities. Our leaders preach that there isn’t one box, bottle or bag that is worth hurting someone at work. Safety is always our first goal and we strive to support work environments where an associate goes home in the same shape, or better than they were when they showed up to work. To bring that all home, we have a great team of engineers, legal, HR, operations and EHS that really work together to solve problems and make the best decisions for associates and the organization. We are partners all working toward the same goals.

Building High-Impact EHS Teams

To build EHS teams that are both highly technical and deeply people-focused, you need to find those candidates who satisfy the type of role you need. Technical independent contributors and people leaders require different skills and expectations. Understanding the organization’s goals, as well as your own, is the critical first step. Once you know that, you can begin going through your candidate pools and whittling down the best for those roles. It’s also important to work with great HR/talent acquisition partners who know your goals. And lastly, you should always include representatives from business partners that the roles will be supporting. Without their buy-in for a candidate, the relationship will start with a steep hill to climb.