As a company committed to safety, you find yourself walking a tightrope. On one hand, safety is part of your core values. You want to ensure that every employee comes to work safe and goes home from work safe and healthy.

Building a positive safety culture, like building a reputation, takes time. In the words of Warren Buffett, it takes 20 years to build a reputation – and five minutes to ruin one.

People management and workplace safety often overlap, though many companies don’t know how to navigate this overlap gracefully. That’s because HR professionals are often asked to wear safety hats that they may not be fully equipped to handle, while safety professionals view HR as stepping on their toes.

EHS is an incredibly diverse, rewarding field. You can have a group of safety professionals in the same room who all work on completely different things. And if you’re a brand-new professional, one of the first steps in your career is figuring out your focus area.

As a safety professional, you’re used to wearing a lot of hats. Sometimes, it feels like all you do is run in twenty different directions, putting out fires.

How and when a company allows employees to return to work after experiencing an injury or illness is something that many companies don’t plan for until the situation is actually happening, which is unfortunately the wrong time to start thinking about it.

The number one priority for any EHS team is ensuring that their workplace is as safe as possible. There’s just one problem: EHS teams can’t be everywhere at once, nor can they spot and analyze every piece of data that might prove useful.

Safety and creativity don’t typically go hand-in-hand. And that’s a shame, because the truth is, creativity is one of the best tools in your EHS toolkit.

You track a lot of safety data. So much data you could build a lake and swim in it. You know there are answers somewhere in all those numbers, but you don’t know how to find them.

Post-incident drug testing has its place in a safety program, but only when it’s managed properly and fairly—and when it’s done for the right reasons.