Organizations invest significant time and resources evaluating environmental, health, and safety (EHS). We conduct compliance audits, review incident rates, track corrective actions, and monitor performance indicators.
Each provides important information. But they don’t necessarily answer another important question:
How developed is the way we manage EHS risks and opportunities?
That is the question an EHS management system maturity assessment can help us explore.
What Do We Mean by an EHS Management System?
The term management system can sound more complicated than it needs to be.
At EHS Compliance Services we often describe an EHS management system simply as:
The way we do things to manage EHS.
It includes how an organization identifies and manages risk, establishes responsibilities, makes decisions, communicates information, executes work, evaluates performance, learns, and improves.
Policies, procedures, training, audits, inspections, and metrics may all be part of the system. But the management system is more than the collection of those individual components. It is how they work together.
Compliance, Performance and Maturity
Compliance and performance are essential lenses for understanding EHS, but they answer different questions:
- Compliance asks: Are we meeting applicable requirements?
- Performance asks: What results are we achieving?
- Maturity asks: How developed is our capability to manage EHS risk, learn, and improve?
Maturity models provide a structured way to examine that development. Goncalves Filho and Waterson describe maturity models as stages or levels used to assess organizations or processes across multiple dimensions. Importantly, maturity models can serve as both assessment and improvement tools, helping organizations identify and prioritize opportunities for continued development.
That distinction matters.
The value of maturity isn’t simply knowing your level. It is understanding what that level tells you about where development may be needed next.
Maturity Isn’t About Doing More EHS
Greater maturity doesn’t necessarily mean more procedures, more training, more audits, or more metrics.
Research examining occupational health and safety risk-management maturity points toward something more fundamental: capability.
Kaassis and Badri developed a maturity model grounded in organizational learning theory. Their levels progress from organizations that learn little from errors, through reactive and standardized approaches, toward proactive risk management and, ultimately, continuous improvement of the management system itself.
This suggests a useful way of thinking about EHS management system maturity as the development of two interconnected capabilities:
- The ability to manage risk.
- The ability to learn and improve.
And perhaps the destination of EHS management system maturity isn’t simply better EHS management.
It is better integration of EHS into management.
As the management system develops, EHS can become increasingly integrated into how the organization plans, makes decisions, manages risk, executes work, learns, and improves.
But Management Systems Don’t Operate in Isolation
This is where another question has emerged for me.
An EHS management system operates within a broader organizational environment.
An organization may have well-designed processes, for example, while competing priorities, unclear decision authority, limited resources, or other conditions make those processes difficult to execute consistently.
The maturity literature itself offers clues that this broader environment matters. Kaassis and Badri’s model considers not only risk-management processes but factors including management, organizational change, leadership, workload, technology, and resources.
So understanding how developed the management system is may be only part of the story.
We may also need to ask:
What organizational conditions may be enabling or constraining how work gets done and how the organization performs?
From Understanding to Action
That question is also informing our work through From Evidence to Action™.
Through the initiative, we are developing and refining an Organizational Conditions Assessment (OCA) and Recommendations Framework designed to help leaders better understand the organizational conditions influencing safety and business performance and translate those insights into meaningful action.
The two perspectives answer different but potentially complementary questions.
An EHS Management System Maturity Assessment helps us understand how developed the way we manage EHS has become.
The OCA helps us examine the broader organizational conditions that may be enabling or hindering performance.
Both ultimately point toward the same objective: not simply generating another score, but giving leaders better evidence for deciding what to strengthen, what to change, and where to focus next.
Because assessment shouldn’t be the destination.
The value is in what we learn and what we do with it.
Continue the Conversation
See what may be influencing performance before it shows up in the outcomes.
Through From Evidence to Action™, Founding Organizations will use the Organizational Conditions Assessment and Recommendations Framework to gain insight into the conditions that may be enabling or hindering safety and business performance, and identify where leadership attention may have the greatest value.
LEARN MORE ABOUT FROM EVIDENCE TO ACTION™
Interested in understanding the maturity of your EHS management system? Contact EHS Compliance Services to learn more about our EHS Management System Maturity Assessment.