This episode features an interview with Angelique (Angie) Dickson, the President of the Inogen Alliance and Senior Vice President of Antea Group USA. In this episode, Angie explores the current EHS landscape and the ways we are rethinking the future of EHS. In addition to the conversation with Angie, we’ll hear from other EHS leaders around the world about their thoughts on rethinking EHS.
This episode features an interview with Angelique (Angie) Dickson, the President of the Inogen Alliance and Senior Vice President of Antea Group USA. She brings over two decades of global management and consulting experience focused on sustainability in a global climate.
In this episode, Angie explores the current EHS landscape and the ways we are rethinking the future of EHS. She highlights major EHS challenges and future trends and emphasizes the need for global cooperation and agility. In addition to the conversation with Angie, we’ll hear from other EHS leaders around the world about their thoughts on rethinking EHS.
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Guest Bio
Angelique Dickson, President of Inogen Alliance, has over 20 years of global management and consulting experience focused on progressively more complex projects, services, and business objectives that promote business sustainability in a global climate. Her creative leadership has focused on project management and strategic planning for customer-focused solutions that integrate creative operational strategies, technology, and external stakeholder engagement. Angie is well versed in identifying business challenges and opportunities in diverse client settings. She has provided innovative solutions to projects in a variety of government and private sector settings that supported client and community stakeholder interests as well as community development. Many of her projects were in a global setting integrating cross-cultural considerations into sustainable planning.
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Guest Quote
“I truly believe that really good things can happen out of global cooperation. And if you think about it all the way up to climate change and our ability to have an impact, that's global cooperation because we can't do it alone. So I do see the Alliance as a bit of a small replica of what can be successful when you work together as teams across countries, cultures, and languages.”
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Time Stamps
*(00:00) Episode Start
*(03:41) Responsibilities as President of Inogen Alliance
*(04:36) Antea Group USA and Angie’s role
*(06:30) Working with multinational companies through the Inogen Alliance
*(08:29) Pressing EHS challenges and trends
*(14:55) Angie’s aha moments
*(17:58) Traditional definition of EHS
*(20:40) Rethinking EHS Post-Pandemic
*(23:53) Future Trends in EHS
*(29:10) Goals for the Inogen Alliance
*(31:50) Tips for EHS practitioners
*(34:38) Thoughts from Lida Tan, President of Anew Global Consulting
*(38:03) Thoughts from Robert Szücs-Winkler, CEO of denxpert software
*(42:19) Thoughts from Hilton Lucio, CEO of Antea Brazil
*(45:10) Thoughts from Joseph Gui, General Manager, Anew Global Consulting
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Rethinking EHS is brought to you by the Inogen Alliance. Inogen Alliance is a global network of environment, health, safety, sustainability and ESG consulting companies working together to provide one point of contact to guide multinational organizations to meet their global commitments locally. Visit http://www.inogenalliance.com/ to learn more.
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Links
Explore Inogen Alliance's resources
[00:00:00] Phil: Imagine this scenario. You work for a large global technology firm as an environmental health and safety director. The organization operates in 141 countries and across 4, 100 facilities. You have to, among other responsibilities, design the emergency response program for the firm, ensuring that you're keeping all of your employees safe around the world, and meeting all of the different regulations across those countries, states, provinces, and cities.
You have to consider things like, how do you keep track of all the diverse local, regional, and national regulations across the world? How do you assess and manage risk in so many different contexts? How do you account for cultural and language differences, some of which you are likely unaware of? You have to comply with local requirements, like good Samaritan laws, AED requirements, and authorizations and permits.
You have to make sure you have sufficient protective equipment to protect you. Fire extinguishers, exit route signage, employee training, alarm systems, rescue equipment, the list goes on and on. For example, in the UK, every tenant of a building is required to have their own fire risk assessment. Whereas in Germany, you're required to have fire wardens and first aiders.
In Japan, you're Fire extinguisher training is required. It's a complex undertaking. Not only will what works in one country not work in another country, but what works in one town or one neighborhood may not work in another. The importance of local understanding and delivery while operating a multinational organization becomes incredibly imperant when responding in a crisis.
If you don't incorporate language and cultural nuances, you'll not get the local action needed in urgent situations. As we see, more and more natural hazards and historic events, such as floods, fires, hurricanes, Earthquakes, and more, this local understanding is crucial. Let's dive into how we're rethinking EHS with global goals and local delivery.
Today on the podcast, I'm thrilled to be joined by Angie Dixon, the president of Inogen Alliance, to dive into the current EHS landscape and how we're rethinking the future of EHS. Angie has over 20 years of global management consulting experience, focused on complex projects. and services that promote business sustainability.
She pursues her commitment to creating a safer, cleaner, and more sustainable world through dual roles. First, she serves as Senior Vice President of Anteo Group, an international environmental consulting firm where she works with brand name companies. She also serves as the President of the Inogen Alliance, a tight knit, global group of EHS and sustainability consultancies bound by a common commitment to sustainability.
To solve some of the greatest challenges that global organizations face today. Through this role, she has the unique opportunity to collaborate with over 6, 000 consultants in over 70 countries, giving her unique insight into the world of EHS and into how we need to rethink our strategies to achieve global goals.
Well, hello, Angie. It's so great to have you here today on the show for our very first episode. So let's just jump into it. When you explain your role as president of Integin Alliance, how do you describe what you do?
[00:03:41] Angie: Well, that's a good question. I'm somewhere in between a, a diplomat and a leader and a sort of a business guide.
Um, Vintage Alliance is an alliance of 70 plus companies that do environment, health and safety and sustainability consulting. So my role is to make sure that we can provide seamless service All over the globe, no matter where we're located, even though we aren't one company. So it's a pretty challenging, but also very rewarding way to be able to provide consulting services to multinational companies.
[00:04:14] Phil: Okay, so if people don't know the Alliance that well, and they're trying to, and they look at you and your background, they would probably see you with Antea Group USA, As well as with the Inogen Alliance. So can you describe a little bit about Antea Group USA's organization and structure and how it ties to the different companies that make up the alliance?
[00:04:36] Angie: It's actually quite simple. So I do work for Antea Group USA, but then I am assigned as the president of the alliance, so it makes it easy. But Antea USA was one of the founding members of the alliance because 23 years ago they were looking at how they could provide. The same consulting services that they were providing in the US to their clients all over the globe.
And they were smart enough, somebody who was very clever, to realize that Americans really shouldn't go into FRAN and assume that they know how they can interpret regulations or how to get permitting or all those services that we normally provide. So they started building partnerships. And those partnerships turned into the Indigent Alliance, and those are still going strong 23 years later.
So NTUS is really one of those founders, and I think a core part of how the alliance works. And that offers our clients what I would say frictionless support. Access to services. So if you have a U S company or multinational and they need the same types of audits or permitting around the world, they can have a single point of contact in the U S and use those consultants.
We can use the consultants in the Alliance all over the world. On their behalf, you have to go to each individual country and start all over again. So that's how Ontario USA ended up as kind of a core member. And that sort of was like, it's my path to be the president.
[00:05:59] Phil: Well, super. So, you know, and I think we'll get to a lot of this as we go through, but if I take it back just for a second, and I, and I look at your experience and I say you work with.
EHS, and sustainability practitioners from all over the world, right? Through the Inogen Alliance, as well as Ferrer and Teja Group, USA. And you also work with these household name, brand name, multinational companies. So what sort of experience do you have by sitting with these types of companies? And looking at the world this way.
[00:06:33] Angie: Well, I think those companies are the world now, right? So when you think about multinational organizations, think of the name brand companies that we know across the globe, they're not in one place. You know, they might start in the U. S. Many of them are based in the U. S. and push our brands out throughout the world.
But the reality is those companies are looking to make sure that what happens in each of the countries they operate is appropriate for that. So let's take health and safety, for example, the health and safety requirements around the world are not the same, nor are employee expectations. So I think what we can do better than others is we can say create, we can take a global approach.
What are you, what's your footprint? What are your priorities? What are your risks? And we can help push that out throughout the world, but be bespoke. At a local level. So what do you really need to do at a local level that takes in that global approach? And, and we learn. So we do that for many companies.
So we start learning what works better. You know, what allows us to go back up at that global level, think smart up there, be efficient, but make sure that what's being implemented at a local level. If you ever try to do an English training in France, you know, it's not that successful. Or if you look at Brazil, for example, there's some very specific laws around health and safety.
Just that being the example right now that you couldn't necessarily sit in the U. S. and understand directly and just assume that you can take that into account. So I think we help our clients be smarter and more efficient. Uh, and I think we look at really being able to present industry best practices and stay helping companies really achieve what we would say is not only minimum requirements, but even potentially gold standards.
[00:08:14] Phil: Okay. So let's talk a little bit about the pressing topics, the primary challenges that EHS leaders are seeing. What sort of trends are you noticing or what questions are you hearing regularly from these folks?
[00:08:29] Angie: So the alliance meets twice a year, in person, and for us it is still really business critical because we get the opportunity to share.
With each other, what are you hearing? What are your clients saying? So that we can think about, you know, how do we collect ourselves and represent ourselves more effectively in the marketplace? And there are a lot of significant trends. I mean, a lot of the life things that we're seeing. I'm, I'm in Minnesota and today our air quality is terrible.
And let's face it, I live in a small town in Minnesota. Normally we have pristine, lovely air. But we've got fires in British Columbia that are flowing down and affecting our air quality. So we hear those things, the things that affect our lives. And you hear about groundwater being contaminated by PFAS.
There's something that you would never imagine and it's coming up through your groundwater and you're watering your garden with it. So these are the types of, I think, topics that we hear that actually affect our lives. Fires, Uh, you know, you think about engineering that's required for flooding. Some of the flooding right now in Brazil, there was a dam that was breached and there are thousands and thousands of people impacted by this event.
So when we hear of all these things, right? So these are global things that are happening where our consulting services can have an impact on mitigating them, look at preventing them, but then we have sort of the practical things like regulations. So if we're looking at working towards a net zero world.
Think about all the regulatory changes. In our recent meeting, we talked a little, a lot about CSRD, which is, you know, the reporting requirements in the EU around carbon. Uh, we talked about that changing in Brazil and it changing in China. And how are companies preparing for that? Not just for reporting, but how are they changing their businesses to be prepared to reduce their carbon footprint and to even get to net zero?
So we hear that as critical factors in our consulting services. Our help is maybe it's data collection. Maybe it's looking at what Impacts can you have? Actually, what are you already doing? A lot of companies are doing great things that are having a positive impact. And so we hear about, you know, how can we help them really look at their current initiative?
[00:10:36] Phil: It's so interesting, you know, that you start with a personal example, right? You start with the air outside my, my door. And then I get the feeling that you would talk with your different colleagues around the world around similar problems, right? Wildfire smoke. affects people in different parts of the world in major ways.
And some are afraid of what's coming. It's like when the sky turned orange in San Francisco during the pandemic, and then did it a few later years later in New York, all the people in New York said, Oh my God, this has actually come and hit me. And what I'm hearing you say is that you have like, You have this local experience that you share with your colleagues around the world and then help provide insights for your clients in the work that you do.
Is that fair?
[00:11:22] Angie: Yes, very much so. And if you just take the wildfires, for example, when they were really bad in a number of places in the world, we had clients say, help us figure out if we should even ask for employees to come to work. You know, is it safe to have our employees? actually make the commute into work?
Are we putting them at risk? And how do we evaluate that? Or are they actually safe at work? Because we have better HVAC systems that will ensure that they actually have cleaner air at work than they might have at home. And if you look around the world, if you say someplace like China, where air quality can be a significant issue, Those same questions actually have a different lens than what they might in the US and California for wildfires.
So those are some of the opportunities we have where you, those are real risk to human beings that sort of manifest themselves within our workplace, but also affect us personally. So it's hard not to be committed at a personal level as well.
[00:12:15] Phil: So let's say we're talking about what the industry itself is doing well versus where it could be doing better.
What sort of things do you see the industry is doing well? Maybe they should double down on. You can see how they can deliver more value for all the constituents that you're trying to serve. Can you comment on that a little bit?
[00:12:36] Angie: I think it's probably more about being agile and evolving. So one of the examples I would give is when you think about how to do better, we're not meeting our.
Net zero goals, right? So if you look at. The carbon footprint and you look at, you know, 2050 is marching very, very quickly towards us. And we've had the hottest, you know, the greatest rise in temperature ever. That can be a little demoralizing at one side, right? So here we are trying to, um, make the world a safe and sustainable place.
And we're not seeing the indicators that we're having success. So you could say we all need to double down. I think for us as consultants, the nice thing is we, we get the advantage of seeing multiple examples from different companies. So if you took, say the tech industry, you know, I get the, the advantage of working with one company and you're like, Hey, this really worked well.
It gives me an opportunity to have a. Open mind about what could happen somewhere else because the reality is there's no cookie cutter approach. You know, we really can't necessarily take one solution, one place and mandate it across even with regulations. You know, the regulations are there to tell us what we can and cannot do, but it doesn't necessarily tell you how.
And so I think that's where, when I think about us being able to double down, it's about being agile. It's about being client centric. And for us, that means, you know, each company has its own personality and culture. How do we really take each one of those and help them be able to really pursue their agenda as best they can and being able to do that on a global scale.
So you really can look at it globally, but you're saying, okay, but we're not going to forget what's happening at that local level. So sustainability will always be, I mean, I think for us in our lifetime, that is going to continue to be that most critical factor.
[00:14:22] Phil: There is a ton of work to be done, a ton of work out there to catch up on the goals, and with this agile approach, with this collaborative approach, the community that you're managing is working more towards those goals on a, on a daily basis.
So, if I think about this concept of cross pollination, what I heard you say was, I learned something in one place that helps me in another. I learned something in one industry that helps me in another. Can you share a story of some aha moments or some surprises that you've encountered?
[00:14:55] Angie: Well, I have a couple of fun stories that I do love and of course, you know, being confidential, but some of it is about being responsive and local.
So we have a very valued client that had promised a client of theirs that within a year they can demonstrate that they were a client with all the health and safety regulations in that country. And I'm going to guess that people who did the sales deal signed the deal like, awesome, you know, and they went on their merry way.
Let's just say that that year there was a month left in that year and that company was looking for this client of ours to validate. that they were meeting all these requirements. And I'm going to be honest, in that particular country, I didn't really quite know what was required, but there was some training and some medical requirements and some fancy signed documents that had to be filed with the government.
And so that's where I might be looking at a global level, being able to like, wow, this could be serious because it went all the way up the chain. And our local consultants were like, we've got this. This is what we do the best. And so that cross pollination was about that local person say, we can do this for you.
Yeah, it would have been nice if we had last year to start, but we can get it in place. Those aha's, sometimes it's not big stuff. It's about being there and filling in some of the gaps, sometimes being the boots on the ground that I think is a really, you know, a very important way that we are adding value.
Another fun example is we had a client that wanted to, um, take out all of their single use plastic in their packaging, or look at the opportunity to take out single use plastic in their packaging. Uh, and it was a U. S. based client. Honestly, Entea Group USA doesn't do that type of engineering. You know, we're not in a position to be able to deconstruct the chemical compounds of packaging.
But our partner in Austria is certainly able to do that. So this is where our collaboration is key. That's something that they do as a core part of their services, but they don't really understand those U. S. companies. They're a little strange, right? So when you think about that value of bringing the cultural and context and business context Antea Group USA could bring, and this other partner that could bring together, we were able to offer a really comprehensive service.
And that, I think, is a great example of what happens all over the world. You know, we've got technical experts that may not understand cultural context, and when you can bring those and align them, just a very cool thing when those things can happen effectively.
[00:17:18] Phil: And from my understanding, this, while the alliance has been around for 23 years, There's always something new in the skills that some of the partners bring to the table because they're building their own expertise in their own countries or they're adding different lines of business and it continues to create new value for being part of the organization itself.
So it actually helps to get to this point that I wanted to ask you about, it helps maybe redefine the segment. But first, can you tell me how you traditionally define the segment? EHS, like how do you traditionally describe environmental health and safety?
[00:17:57] Angie: Well, that's a good question. So, you know, you're right.
So each associates, we're at 70 plus companies and environment services could be different in every single one of those. You know, so we've got some companies that do geotechnical, some companies that do engineering, some companies that do environmental impact assessments. But what we've tried to do is say, you know, there's a core set of services that we define as environment.
You know, it's things like audits and assessments. It's permitting. It's hazardous waste. It's waste. You know, so we've tried to say there's this package of things that we define as environment. That doesn't mean that we can't do specialty things. It just has allowed us to kind of align around some of those more traditional environmental consulting services.
Then when you go to health and safety, same kind of thing. We might have one company that's, you know, really big into construction safety and another company, not so much. But what that allows us to do is leverage each other. So if you think about occupational health, or psychosocial, or medical requirements, or literally just the health and safety of your employees in the workplace or manufacturing side or distribution center, those are all those traditional services that we would put forward.
And they might include things like ergonomics or other specialty areas. You know, if there's a company with a specific thing designed for safety, for example, we have a couple of companies that are really good at that. Not everybody is, but when we have one of those, a client that needs that support, I know exactly who, you know, at Chola Risk in India, very, very good at that.
You know, I can pull them in and I know that they'll provide a high quality input to whatever that, that challenge is. So I think that's a good thing is, so we have some sort of traditional EHS. And we would say the other S, the sustainability, same thing, whether it's greenhouse gas accounting or, you know, reporting or water and, you know, water vulnerability.
Those types of things are typical, but it's certainly not exclusive.
[00:19:49] Phil: Sure. So if I'm hearing you right, The traditional descriptions of EHS are kind of expanded because you have global expertise and then you add in the sustainability component, it expands a bit more. So when you say you're rethinking EHS, is it How do you describe the rethinking of it, right?
Because I, I heard from corporations, there are things that you must do in certain places to make your workplace safe, or there are things that you must do to be compliant with certain regulatory guidelines. But then there's all these different other things that touch people in their lives, touch people in their workplaces.
And the relationship between work and life and different parts of the world is more interesting and more connected. Is that in the right direction of rethinking EHS?
[00:20:39] Angie: Well, I think there's a couple of things with that. So first of all, COVID really upended EHS, and especially the health and safety, um, in our world, some people might be responsible for E, H, and S.
Some people might be responsible for just H& S and some might be responsible for EHS and us. So it just kind of depends on the company. But for the first time during the pandemic, health and safety became a business critical factor. I mean, absolutely business critical. So, you know, that global EHS director that was hidden somewhere was now talking to the CEO of gigantic companies and say, This is how we're going to keep our doors open, or this is how we're not going to keep our doors open, but keep business operating.
So I do think there's been a bit of a shift in that importance. And so when we look at now about rethinking EHS, Okay. Now the pandemic's passed. Some of us just want to forget it and move on. Right. It was a little traumatic in some way. However, EHS is still a really important part of businesses. And where we're seeing some of that shift is employees expect it.
You know, how do you retain your employees? How do you help make sure they have, they're safe when they're working at home? I mean, come on, that's complicated. If anybody's seen my dining room table, you know, how do we know that that's a safe place to work? But really that's the new environment that we're starting to think about is.
Health and safety has shifted from what it used to be when we were all coming into an office and we had control over where people work. So we're trying to look at what that new environment looks like. How do we keep EHS in a forefront of importance for businesses while adding value? You know, how is that adding value back to the company?
And obviously you want your workers to leave the same. Condition, if not better condition than when they came, whether that was sitting at their dining room table or coming to an office. We want to ensure that there's no hazards when they're there, or we're mitigating those or engineering them out as best we can.
And we can do that. I think we need to do that differently and better. And it actually coming back to how companies are able to retain talent. People are expecting it. You know, they want to know that companies are looking after them. So I think this shift is where we're looking at, how do you rethink? EHS and how does it become still part of your business value that your company really values?
And it also for practitioners. So all those people out there that are EHS people within their own organizations, you know, every day it's about how do you add value and bring value to the company while not. All making sure the company's able to do its primary mission, whether that's making chips or developing software or whatever that mandate is.
[00:23:13] Phil: You know, your story about the pandemic reminds me of a conversation I had with a real estate executive during the time they were from a traditional real estate firm. And they said, the pandemic forced us to change our business. We'd been around for a hundred years first or changed our, our industry to change our business more in a quarter than we've done in the last 25 years.
So, and I'm hearing you say some of the same things. So if you were to highlight a couple trends or a couple areas coming in the future, in the near future, what are some things folks should be looking for or that you see on the horizon as, as areas that are changing because of this rethinking of EHS?
[00:23:51] Angie: Yeah, one of the topics that comes to mind right now is occupational health. And that's not really a U. S. term that we use so much, but think of occupational health of all the things that are impacting, uh, your employee's health. So, and some of it's regulatory required, so it'd be like ergonomics, it'd be like your air quality.
It would be, uh, maybe you're required to have medical, you know, your own personal health and being able to come to work. So occupational health, and the other big thing that fits in there is psychosocial. Yeah. How is your mental health? And that's really complicated because there's mental health, part of HR, is a part of health and safety.
And so those are the topics that we're seeing really in the forefront, especially for global companies where what's expected in one country is very different than what's expected in another. And even that term psychosocial, we don't use that a lot in the U. S., but if you go out in the rest of the world, It's hugely present and ease, not necessarily that there's a cookie cutter approach to being able to solve that and do it well.
So you, especially if you think about a U. S. based company, trying to understand the mental wellbeing of their employees, not even in the context of, of an HR standpoint, but, you know, in the environment that they're in and that environment sort of starts hitting on health and safety. So for us, we see that as being one of those really big trends that is, that is, that is Trying to figure out the best way, you know, do you take a risk based approach and it's not going to be, so you have a different solution for every single country that you're in, or can you create sort of that standard across the globe that then allows you to ensure you're compliant, your workers are safe, and they're happy at work and so on.
So that's really a big one.
[00:25:26] Phil: That was the question that came to mind while you were talking. I was wondering how the members of the alliance deal with that friction, right? Working from home is probably different from San Diego to Singapore to Senegal, right? They probably have, there are a different number of challenges and opportunities and possibly some inherent conflict if you're trying to normalize those things across.
So can you talk a little bit about how the team, I think we already know, but how the team actually works together to kind of Rationalize or work through those issues ahead of them.
[00:26:02] Angie: Well, so we do a couple of things. So one, we have working groups because it gives us an opportunity to communicate. So that brings practitioners together on a particular topic across the globe.
So then we start getting insights from each other and start drawing the lines and dotting the dots. So we're like, okay, you know, you start, start seeing that global picture better. So we can do that better on behalf of our clients. So I think those working groups are really critical for us. The next thing is just understanding the changing dynamics of what's required.
So literally understanding what the legal requirements are in, you know, 50, 70 countries. So if you start thinking about how could a company synthesize up here and standardize and be more efficient, you know, by us just really investing that we understand what those requirements are across the globe, we can start building a better picture.
Of how it can be responded to. And then that goes also back to those meetings where in our meetings twice a year, we really are talking about it. What are we hearing? What are we seeing? What are the pain points that aren't working and what are ways that we can solve those? So I think it's staying ahead of, you know, the regulatory trends and understanding those, but also being able to try to tie that up together so that we're really able to represent that more effectively.
[00:27:16] Phil: Sure. When you think about companies that need this expertise. A lot of the companies, I'm getting the feeling, they won't have this expertise in house. They couldn't have this expertise in house. How do you distill all of what you just said into a clean value proposition for the existing clients?
[00:27:35] Angie: Hey, the reality is, in any EHS team, right, so if there's, no matter how big an internal EHS team is, it's really impossible to have an expert in every single area, right?
So what I think about consulting, and one of the reasons I actually love consulting is that We get to be a trusted partner only when we're needed. And so we get to bring value just when that value is needed. So instead of sitting there and doing stuff day to day, we can come in specifically help in something.
And, you know, for some companies, for example, we are their EHS team all over the world. On a regular day to day basis. But for the other companies, we might come in once a year in 30 countries and do a risk assessment and some first aid training, or, you know, we might have a full time person in one country because it's required and another country, we, we come in once a month.
So not only do we have the ability to rally up all of this information on a global scale, but it can be just as little or as much, you know, it's on demand as needed. So companies can really tailor to their priorities. And, you know, invest where they feel like it makes the most sense.
[00:28:37] Phil: And when you come in, you're sharp because of your global experience, your global teams, the global working groups and, and all that you bring right to the, to the table when someone needs it.
So I want to shift to the last couple of questions and ask you first about goals and then some like lessons and parting thoughts you have for listeners. So in terms of. What you'd like for people to get out of the experience with us in this series. Can you talk a little bit about the goals you have for the organization, the goals you have for your clients or, you know, for the, for the podcast itself?
[00:29:13] Angie: Well, I think I would say with the podcast first is that sometimes being an EH& S person can be lonely, you know, you're trying, you have all the right intentions, you want to keep people safe. You want to protect the environment. You know, you want to create a safer, more sustainable world. Sometimes that can be lonely in a company that.
So, I hope these podcasts are a place to sort of share here that you're not alone. You know, we're all kind of on a journey. Sometimes we're really successful. Sometimes it's really challenging. So, I hope that's part of it, but I think as far as thinking about taking away from the alliance. Is that I truly believe that really good things can happen out of global cooperation.
And if you think about it all the way up to climate change and our ability to have an impact, that's global cooperation because we can't do it alone. So I do see the Alliance as a bit of a small replica of what can be successful when you work together as teams across countries and cultures and languages.
Uh, and I think when we individually feel that success, that helps us push that success, you know, on a, on a broader and bigger scale. So this, this is an opportunity, you know, our opportunity to really, uh, continue to, to push that agenda. When I think about goals for the Alliance, we can always do better, right?
You know, we still are 75 companies and so we can communicate better. We can communicate more, we can be more innovative. So I think that constant desire to continue to improve and respond to what Multinational organizations or companies need helps us to set higher quality agendas and what can be happening in the world and how much can get done.
You know, sometimes we're just the boots on the ground, not just, but I mean, we can be the difference of nothing happening this year and something significant happening. So that's important. I think for us, that goal of continuing to look at how we communicate, how we innovate. And how we really ensure that that global coverage is available consistently across the globe is important for that's what we do best.
Okay,
[00:31:16] Phil: so that's awesome. I often think at the end of these about who's the listener and what might we have that's of value for them. And if you wanted to give someone the tips, that person who's sitting there, Maybe feeling alone, that person who's sitting there saying, I have some challenges that I don't know necessarily how to tackle myself.
What are some tips you have for them on maybe places they can go or resources they can use and outside of course, of this podcast, where they might, you know, meet and encounter other folks who can help them along their way. Do you have any suggestions for them?
[00:31:51] Angie: Well, I mean, I am one thing. I think that peer to peer.
It's an amazing way for EHS people to informally benchmark, right? And so if you don't, if you have other peers in the industry that work at other companies or organizations, I really encourage you to reach out to them. We've seen some great success stories where peers, either in an industry or outside of industry come together and they're informally benchmarking, you know, there's no, no competitive or nobody's giving out confidential information, but it's so nice to be able to say, well, I know that company X is doing this.
You know, as you're talking to your leadership, that ability to be able to just informally share what you know other companies are doing and doing it confidently. Can make a big difference. And I think pushing your own agenda, it's just a gut check, right? And companies are always wanting to do the right thing, but not too much because it's expensive or it's not.
So I think that peer to peer networking, I really, really encouraged providers to, to try to find that network. And LinkedIn of course, is always great for that. And we have some ways that we do it as well. So always happy to discuss how that happened. You know, and we all participate in our practitioner associations.
So I think what people are going to find from this podcast is I'm the biggest generalist. You know, I'm looking at it from the globe and all kinds of cool things, but we have these great experts in PFAS and, and in flood risk. And all of these topics that are, we're hearing in the news, we have amazing consultants, but they also join other peers.
And a lot of that would be conferences and global forums. But I find that LinkedIn alone is like your daily global forum. You know what I mean? LinkedIn alone has, there's on demand webinars. There's topics, you know, that are thought leadership about what's happening or interpreting what's happening. I find that that's really a great place to sort of keep tabs.
And then when you find something that's really interesting, you can It gives you a pointed way to go dig in deep and go look for additional information. But. There's just amazing amount of information and content, of course, as we call it on LinkedIn. I really encourage people to take advantage of that as well.
[00:33:53] Phil: Well, you've shared a number of different ways for people to connect and help themselves solve their own problems or connect with peers. And if there's so much work to do and so much knowledge to be shared, there's probably a lot of benefit to be gained from that. So thank you very, very much. Really appreciate you sharing your time with us today and look forward to seeing you back here sometime soon.
[00:34:15] Angie: Well, thank you, Phil. And this was great. Really excited to be able to share some of what we do and the impact we hope to make in the world through this venue.
[00:34:25] Phil: Before we wrap up today's discussion, we wanted to share some insights from other EHS leaders. On Rethinking EHS. Here's a highlight from Lida Tan, President of Anew Global Consulting and part of the Enogen Alliance Leadership Team.
She touches on the evolving role of EHS compliance over the past decade and emphasizes its expansion to a broader global perspective.
[00:34:52] Lida: So to me, to Anew, rethinking EHS has a broader implication. Traditionally, say 10 years ago, most of our services are on site specific health and safety and environmental compliance.
And with the time change, I think with the global market and also the value chain getting more and more important onto a lot of companies sustainability map. EHS compliance is much broader now. EHS is about their global coverage. It is not just their factory. It's their global supply chain. What's upstream, what's downstream, and how it's made.
And compliance in various countries, laws are different. So compliance may mean different things. But to us, to help big brands with large global coverage of supply chain, EHS is a lot more about having a consistency, having one standard, or having one protocol. And also, it goes beyond your factory.
Boundary. It is, for example, for on the safety side, instead of saying this chemical is safe or meets a compliance, a lot of companies are going beyond just is it safe for the workers? Can we use less? Is there a better alternative for that particular hazardous chemical? So we're getting into the space of green chemistry.
So the compliance becomes a one more step as to what more can we do to help protect the workers and not just merely. Meeting, whatever the local compliance regulation is. So that's the sort of the global coverage. And also, as I said earlier, it's the supply chain. So what companies ESHA's policy is, is really getting to the space on sustainability, is that as you are meeting environmental compliance, are there materials, are there water they're using?
Are they impacting the local watershed where your products are made? And can you decrease the water usage? Can you increase your energy efficiency? You know, there might be an energy shortage there. Can you use more renewable energy? So the environmental compliance. is going beyond just meeting the local regulation.
It's really looking at how do you efficiently manage and encourage your supply chain to go beyond the mere compliance, but to look at energy efficiency, water efficiency, material use efficiency, and also having a worker voice. into the process. And so it is a lot more dynamic. So our companies and Energia's network comes in is that we have, we not only know the local regulation, but we are network of sustainability professionals where we can bring and help a lot of our clients go beyond the mere compliance, but go beyond and to meet the sustainability goals, which will eventually become a requirement.
[00:38:00] Phil: Now let's hear a snippet from Robert Szücs-Winkler. CEO of denxpert Software and Workgroup Leader for Digital Solutions for Intergen Alliance, where he dives into the current evolution and essential adaptation of EHS leadership roles from operational to strategic, driven by the increasing importance of ESG priorities.
EHS became strategic in the
[00:38:26] Robert: last couple of years. There are three drivers who were pushing this change. The first one was COVID. which make sure that health and safety is. a strategic position organization to make sure that there's a continuous business. Second one is ESG, which makes sure that DHS is in the financial strategy CEO level because the investors expect to perform better.
And the third one is digitalization. Because all these complexities I talked about before need digital solutions to streamline data collection, streamline communication, and streamline all the efforts and processes in the organization. Do you remember as a DHHS practitioner when COVID hit? How it impacted you?
Because in that moment you became the most important person in the organization to ensure that your company can continue to work. And your employees are safe in that environment that they have to deliver that work. And in that moment, people in management understood your name, they know who you are, and they expected you to be in the company, and give them guidance, what to do next, how to ensure that everything is safe.
You have the responsibility. The next thing is to make sure that people who are working from home, they are also following your health and safety guidelines, they are safe, but your company can still operate. You needed the help from your IT department to digitalize everything, to make risk assessments at home or in the company.
You needed technologies that you never thought about, you needed protective equipment that you never thought you would need to learn about with doctors and other things. So, uh, this pivotal role, I think, was very, very important. We had many, many clients, partners, who we helped back then. And it was a really, really strange, scary, but thinking afterwards, very uplifting moment for EHS practitioners.
So, rethinking EHS for me means the change from operation to strategy. In the past, EHS was something operational, managing the risk, but with the advent of ESG, it becomes more and more strategic. So, in the past, you were someone who had to do stuff, Make sure that everything is right, but in the future, you're going to the CEO, you're in connection with the CFO, you're in connection with the supply chain.
And I think that's a big strategic shift in your thinking, how you have to, as a DHS leader, DHS practitioner, approach your job. Last year, talking with one of our partners, who is a client of DHS, And the CEO of an organization went to a conference, a pharmaceutical conference, and in that conference, CEOs were talking about, usually they were talking about what kind of research they had in the field of medication.
Then what kind of pharmaceutical products are they selling and what kind of profits they can deliver. These are the main drivers for pharmaceutical companies. But this changed drastically because at that conference, the CEO finally had to talk about ESG performance. What is your ESG performance? What are you doing?
What are the key KPIs that you are measuring? And this CEO was not aware of the ESG trends. So when he came back, he said, They had no person in the organization who was aware of ESG, so went to the EHS practitioner. So finally the EHS practitioner became a person who had to make research, what is ESG, how does it impact the organization.
and became finally the ESG responsible and on to the EHS responsibility as well. So I think a lot of EHS practitioners have to think in terms of ESG as well, because this could be their future role. And I strongly believe that EHS will be part of ESG in the future. This will be a very important part, but it means also that EHS people have to know a lot of new things and a lot of different kinds of things.
Way of thinking, which means more strategic
[00:42:15] Phil: thinking. Next up, let's listen to a short clip with Hilton Lucio, CEO of Antea Brazil, and Integin Alliance board member. In this clip, he shares the growing complexities of EHS in today's business landscape. Highlighting the shift from traditional EHS concerns to more modern issues like mental health.
[00:42:37] Hilton: For me, rethinking environmental health and safety in the 21st century is a much more complex definition of what the boundaries of a business are and what that business does. As far as health and safety, we used to worry a lot about Very material risks inside petrochemical plants, inside manufacturing plants.
And today, as services evolve, we're more, much more focused on what's happening in office buildings with risks that are still very material, like the quality of air conditioning, the temperature, but also things related to the mental health of people. Like if you're not feeling well, How can you perform inside a very intellectual project that's been demanded by your boss?
Mental health, stress, are risks that we need to help our clients to figure out and mitigate much better than a couple of years ago. As far as environment, if a couple of years ago we were concerned about what's happening inside the walls of a facility, today you have to worry about what's Watersheds, aquifers, and biodiversity that are not going to happen inside your facility, that are not going to manage in the same way you would manage your procedures, your policies around the environment.
Much more complex arrangements around water sustainability, carbon emissions, and social responsibility. What we are doing to reinvent. It's basically adding talented people to the equation. It's very easy to provide our clients with a list of the applicable rules and regulations in a country, but does your business truly understand them?
Do we have people in the ground that can help you with the do's and the don'ts? We've been providing our clients with people that are fully embedded into their cultural context. And that, therefore, can help a lot in determining priorities, in determining strategies, and assuring that you're going to be compliant in every and each level of the countries where you are operating.
[00:45:08] Phil: Lastly, take a listen to this snippet from Joseph Gui from Anew Global Consulting as he talks about How EHS is essential for providing key benefits and supporting clients future goals. Each coin
[00:45:21] Joseph: has two sides. If EHS is to provide service, then Rethink EHS is like the other side of the coin to provide benefits such as people benefits, compliance savings, insurance savings, and the loss avoidance.
Rethink EHS is the key to provide our value to our clients and to help them with future goals.
[00:45:44] Phil: In this episode, I loved having the opportunity to talk with Angie about her perspective of environmental health and safety, what EHS was, what it really meant, and so she could share some of her expertise and some of her perspectives.
I think there's something special about having EHS and sustainability practitioners from all over the world really meet and work together as they do in the Alliance. Their close connection, their collegiality, their ability to communicate about different issues makes each one of them better individually and as a group. In this discussion, I really hope that we've helped everyone listening understand some of the great things these folks have learned and how they've been able to put them into play in the work that they do every day.
[00:46:34] Voiceover: Thank you for joining us on this episode of Rethinking EHS. We'd like to thank our esteemed guests for sharing their invaluable insights on how we're reshaping the future of EHS.
Don't forget to hit that subscribe button wherever you listen to podcasts. So you never miss another episode. For more tools and tips on how to work globally with a local lens, check out the global resources page on the Inogen Alliance website to access webinars, download eBooks, and more. Find the link in the show notes or visit www.inogenalliance. com forward slash resources. Until next time, let's innovate, inspire, and rethink EHS togethe