Maintaining environmental compliance is about ensuring your company meets the requirements of relevant laws and regulations that are in place for the sustainability of the environment.
Performing environmental due diligence provides the opportunity to confirm your adherence to environmental regulations, set up the appropriate policies for your business, and manage programs that ensure ongoing compliance amongst employees.
As a company, the most important thing you can do to uphold compliance is to ensure you are keeping current with environmental regulations to monitor any changes or updates that may affect you. Depending on the offense, there is a wide range of penalties the courts can impose including fines in excess of one million dollars as well as a term of imprisonment. Other penalties may also include environmental service orders including remediation, or publication orders requesting a public apology.
Other risks and implications your company should be aware of may include, but not limited to;
- Direct involvement from regulators for non-compliant activities
- Impacts to new and existing client relationships and opportunities
- Misalignment of your business with the changing market and perceptions of customers
- Financial impacts
- Damages to business profiles and marketing positioning
- Effectiveness of business strategy to capture and manage environmental risk and opportunity
Staying up to date with regulations is crucial in avoiding these risks and penalties. Here are some suggested methods for staying on top of changing regulations and establishing the appropriate business processes for your company to remain compliant.
- Establish procedures to regularly check regulatory websites and subscribe to newsletters that post updated standards for your specific industry. This ensures that you have all the information you need to carry out your business effectively and compliantly.
- Sign-up to as many industry associations as possible. These organizations alert their members of any significant changes that apply to their industry and are great resources to have on hand if you are unsure of a specific regulation change or update.
- Attend training sessions, conferences, and seminars to broaden your knowledge on regulation, learn of any new standards and the best way to implement these in your workplace, as well as connect with peers within the industry.
- Appoint an employee to handle your business’ compliance matters. It will make it easier to stay on top of changes and updates if there is a person designated to this task.
- Implement a policy and obligations management software that will work to automate processes and manage employee compliance. This can help centralize your company’s compliance information and make it easier to track.
- Requesting an audit of your company’s current practices and operations can be useful in identifying areas of weakness that need to be updated and changed to meet standards.
Finding ways to remain current on compliance requirements is important to protecting your business, employees and your operations. Failure to comply can have long-lasting impacts and damaging cost to your company.
INX InForm provides the tools to manage obligations, stakeholders, issues and communications in one place. It enables you to better understand and interact with obligations, ISO standards and stakeholders through registers that are designed to profile, capture and record information, documents, points of engagement, and establish action plans and record any compliance breaches.
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