Are You Finance Ready?

A quick checklist for EHS leaders who need to justify program investment in financial terms.

The Checklist for EHS Leaders Asking for More Budget:

Get the budget your EHS program deserves without needing an incident to be taken seriously.

Most EHS leaders have the metrics. What they lack is the translation: a way to connect EHS performance to the numbers Finance evaluates: current cost, potential cost, and cost avoidance.

This checklist shows where your current data and reporting support that conversation and where they don’t across six areas:

• Cost of incidents
• Training ROI
• Early warning signals
• Risk exposure quantification
• EHS workload and administrative cost
• Financial modeling of EHS investments

Built on experience

The questions and framework in this checklist draw on conversations with Scott Gaddis, Vice President and Global Practice Leader for Safety and Health at Intelex. He is an EHS leader with 35+ years of experience navigating the exact conversations you’re preparing for.

Scott has spent his career helping EHS leaders make the financial case for safety investment at organizations including Kimberly-Clark and Bristol-Myers Squibb. He knows what Finance asks, what the C-suite needs to hear, and where most EHS programs fall short in speaking the language of business.

In his words: “You have to reframe EHS talk in the terms of business talk. That’s really where we fail.”