Risk management has changed dramatically in recent years. What was once often viewed through the lens of emergency response, compliance audits, or isolated risk assessments has become a much broader business conversation. Today, risk moves faster, crosses borders more easily, and affects everything from workforce health and safety to supply chain performance, regulatory exposure, reputation, and business continuity.
In Episode 3 of Season 3 of Rethinking EHS, host Keith Knoke, Chair of the Board for Inogen Alliance and Executive Vice President at Antea Group USA, is joined by Alizabeth Aramowicz Smith of Antea Group USA and Chris Trim of Peter J. Ramsay & Associates in Australia to discuss how organizations are moving from reactive compliance toward proactive resilience.
Together, they explore why EHS leaders are playing a more strategic role, how leading indicators can help organizations act earlier, why management of change is becoming a critical risk tool, and how global collaboration with local expertise helps companies manage increasingly complex risks across regions.
Listen to the full episode: The New Era of Risk Management: From Compliance to Resilience
Keith Knoke: Risk feels fundamentally different today. It is faster, more interconnected, and always present. What has changed most?
Alizabeth Smith: One of the biggest changes is speed. A situation at one facility can quickly magnify through social media and other channels, creating impacts across the workforce, supply chain, customer relationships, and broader business performance.
Risk has also expanded beyond the traditional boundaries of EHS. It is no longer limited to emergency response plans or risk assessments. It now touches financial resilience, cybersecurity, environmental health and safety, procurement, and the broader resilience planning of the company.
That shift makes risk management more complex. Instead of one function managing risk in isolation, many stakeholders now need to contribute. The challenge is keeping those voices aligned across corporate offices, regional teams, and local facilities.
Keith Knoke: Many organizations have large global footprints and relatively small EHS functions. How has EHS become more relevant at the board and strategy level?
Alizabeth Smith: Boards and executive teams are increasingly focused on leading indicators. They want to understand not only what happened last year, but what might happen next. That includes whether systems are about to fail, where staffing or budget decisions may be needed, and how emerging risks could affect business continuity.
Several pressures have elevated EHS conversations, including workforce availability, employee retention, geopolitical issues, supply chain requirements, and regulatory complexity. In that environment, failure is not just a compliance concern. It can affect business performance, staffing, budgets, and long-term resilience.
Keith Knoke: Did the pandemic permanently change the role of EHS and organizational risk management?
Chris Trim: COVID-19 created a step change in how people understood risk. It reinforced that there is no such thing as eliminating risk entirely. Instead, organizations need to understand risk, identify issues early, and be as proactive as possible.
Alizabeth Smith: COVID also brought workforce risk to the forefront. Psychosocial risk, employee stress, workforce availability, and the broader relationship between worker wellbeing and business continuity gained a much more prominent role.
While the intensity of EHS influence may have reduced slightly from the peak of the pandemic, many of the indicators, responsibilities, and reporting expectations created during that period remain.
Keith Knoke: Traditionally, EHS functions were often focused on downside risk, such as preventing injuries or avoiding environmental harm. Are you seeing a shift toward business resilience?
Chris Trim: Yes. Organizations are increasingly planning ahead and recognizing the value of looking forward. Instead of only asking whether they are compliant today, they are asking what could disrupt operations, what risks are emerging, and what indicators should be monitored.
That shift requires organizations to get people involved early, align management around expectations, and identify the key indicators that need to be communicated to the rest of the business.
For global organizations, resilience depends on more than regulatory compliance. It requires understanding operational risk, workforce risk, supply chain risk, business continuity, and the cultural and regional contexts that influence how risk is managed.
Keith Knoke: Are organizations evaluating operational EHS risks earlier during business decisions, such as acquisitions or major investments?
Chris Trim: Yes. Due diligence is increasingly moving beyond a narrow focus on environmental liabilities or regulatory requirements. Organizations want to understand what could interrupt the business, what controls are in place, and how likely certain risks are to occur.
In one example, a due diligence assessment of bus depots identified an underground fuel leak that affected remediation planning and transaction negotiations. The lesson is that reliable information early in the process helps organizations make better business decisions.
Alizabeth Smith: Sustainability, health and safety, occupational health, supply chain resilience, packaging, PFAS, and other operational risks are also showing up earlier in due diligence conversations. These areas can reveal important information about company culture, resilience, and the potential cost of integrating a business into an existing portfolio.
For organizations involved in M&A or global investment decisions, check out Inogen Alliance EHS Due Diligence services, which help clients identify, assess, and prioritize EHS and ESG risks to support informed business decisions.
Keith Knoke: Companies no longer have the luxury of waiting to react. What leading indicators are proving useful, especially for health and safety?
Alizabeth Smith: Some leading indicators have existed for years, but they are gaining traction because organizations now need better visibility into system health. Examples include preventive maintenance completion, corrective action closure, completion of key risk training, and employee improvement suggestions.
These indicators help organizations see whether the system is healthy in the moment. If preventive maintenance slips, for example, it may signal a larger issue before an incident occurs. Digital systems can help aggregate this information across sites, business units, and corporate leadership levels.
This is more than tracking near misses. It is about identifying weak signals, understanding patterns, and acting before something becomes a business interruption, compliance issue, or safety event.
Check out Incident Prevention Programs and Investigation, focusing on reporting, investigation, data analysis, claims management, return-to-work processes, and compliance reporting.
Keith Knoke: Many organizations rely on environmental or EHS information management systems. Are companies becoming more sophisticated in how they interpret that data?
Chris Trim: As organizations build stronger reporting systems and gather more experience, they can start using judgment and trend analysis to anticipate where risks may be heading. Instead of simply reacting after something is recorded, they can begin to interpret data and predict potential changes.
The value is not just in collecting data. The value comes from understanding what the data means and translating it into action.
Keith Knoke: What role does Management of Change play in modern risk management?
Alizabeth Smith: For one client, the Management of Change process became the most important piece of data in the environmental management system because it showed whether critical risks were being evaluated early.
A new piece of equipment, a new chemical, or a change in process can create many downstream requirements. It may require new standard operating procedures, training, documentation, engineering controls, visual safety updates, and regulatory review.
The investment is often much larger than the initial purchase cost because the organization must also manage the risk of bringing that change into the facility.
Chris Trim: Successful change management also depends on involving the right people early. If a change is simply enforced after the decision has already been made, it may not stick. Bringing stakeholders into the process helps create continuity and better outcomes.
Inogen Alliance’s EHS Management Systems services support organizations with ISO standards, management system implementation, internal audits, corrective action tracking, global program development, and site-specific procedures.
Keith Knoke: Global organizations rarely manage risk alone. What does effective collaboration look like on the ground?
Chris Trim: Effective collaboration depends on communication and a shared understanding of the client’s risk profile. When teams communicate well, they can develop better information, assess risks more effectively, and support consistent decision-making.
Alizabeth Smith: One of the strengths of Inogen Alliance is the ability to reach out across the network when a client faces a unique situation. Local experts can provide insight into how similar risks have been managed and how approaches may need to differ by country, culture, and regulatory environment.
That local context matters. The right solution in one country may not work the same way in another. A consistent global framework needs to be paired with local expertise so organizations can manage risk effectively while respecting regional requirements and expectations.
Chris Trim: Consistency is also essential. Global clients need localized expertise, but they also need a consistent approach that allows them to compare results across regions rather than receiving reports that cannot be evaluated side by side.
Keith Knoke: If EHS leaders should watch one emerging risk right now, what would it be?
Chris Trim: Psychosocial risk.
Workforce wellbeing, stress, changing expectations, and psychosocial health are becoming increasingly important to organizational resilience. As regulations and expectations continue to evolve, psychosocial risk is moving from a human resources issue into a broader enterprise risk and EHS conversation.
Organizations looking to move from compliance to resilience can begin by asking a few practical questions:
Risk management today requires more than a compliance checklist. It requires earlier insight, better data, proactive planning, strong Management of Change processes, and the ability to translate global strategy into practical local action.
Through a global network of local EHS and sustainability experts, Inogen Alliance helps multinational organizations identify, assess, and manage risk across countries, facilities, supply chains, and regulatory environments. Our Associates bring local knowledge, technical expertise, and practical implementation support to help organizations strengthen resilience while maintaining consistency across regions.
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