Reimagining EHS Audits

Key takeaways from industry leaders

Is your EHS audit program just a box-ticking exercise, or is it driving real business value?

In our recent blog, “From Compliance to Catalyst: How EHS Audits Must Drive Business Value,” we challenged the status quo and the response was significant. EHS professionals from diverse industries and regions shared their views through a pulse survey. Building on this, senior EHS and audit leaders came together for a roundtable discussion of the survey findings highlighting the solutions that deliver the greatest impact in their organizations and exploring the ongoing challenges they face in EHS auditing today.

Many organizations still see EHS audits as primarily a compliance activity, but there is a clear desire from the leaders we engaged to shift towards audits that add strategic value and drive meaningful improvement. Here are three top takeaways from our research and roundtable discussions that reveal where EHS audits are headed and why now is the time to reimagine your approach.

1. Culture is Critical

Audit processes can be thorough and extensive, but culture is what truly counts.

• Collaborative Culture: The most effective audit programs thrive in a culture that is collaborative, transparent, and supportive. Involving expertise from other functions (such as operations, engineering, and procurement) not just EHS, ensures actions are understood and implemented across the organization. These are audits being done with people, not to them.
• Communication and Transparency: Clear communication at every stage is essential, from setting terms of reference and pre-audit requests, to delivering the final report and post-audit activities (e.g., action plans, data analysis). No one likes negative surprises, so keep proactive communication front of mind as a key to creating a culture where audits are seen as learning opportunities that add value, not as a business distraction.
• Leadership Influence: Leadership’s attitude toward audits, whether in the boardroom or on-site, shapes their effectiveness. If leaders don’t genuinely recognize the value audits can bring, those who follow their lead won’t either, no matter how technically skilled your auditors are.

Self-Reflection: Does your audit culture foster collaboration and transparency, or could the way audits are conducted be undermining trust?

2. Technology and AI are helpful – But humans are essential

While 66% of survey respondents have not yet integrated AI into their audit programs, most agree it’s inevitable and likely urgent to avoid falling behind.

• Need for Adoption: There’s strong consensus that greater use of technology - whether enterprise EHS software or workflows built on common business software applications - is essential to streamline data capture, simplify reporting, and improve action tracking.
• Current State: And yet, many organizations feel confident using technology to support EHS audits, yet a significant number still rely on spreadsheets and email.
• AI Use Cases: Shared examples include pre-audit document review and translation, analyzing large datasets, report writing, and tracking the status of actions.
• Benefits: Proven and perceived gains include efficiency improvements that free auditors to spend more time on-site and dig deeper into issues.
• Human Element: Technology and AI can assist, but they can’t replace human judgment - observations and instinct during site visits, conversations that uncover operational realities, and contextual insights that shape meaningful recommendations and resultant actions are essential.

Self-Reflection: What specific AI use cases have you identified for your audit program, and how clearly are they linked to business value?

3. Capability development and knowledge sharing are the foundation of effective audits

It’s clear that auditors need more than technical expertise - they require empathy, trust-building, and strong communication skills to maximize their impact.

• Balanced Skill Set: Creating psychological safety is critical for employees to feel comfortable sharing information openly during audits and to ensure a willingness to collectively learn and improve when failings are uncovered. An audit by itself can’t create a psychologically safe environment, but the way it is conducted can certainly erode or enhance it.
• Investment in Training: Organizations are investing in training for both technical and soft skills to strengthen auditor capability, recognizing the critical importance of the auditor in the audit program. We heard about using peer review processes to develop experience and to share knowledge across sites and business units, especially with respect to what good looks like. Some focus on coaching auditors ”on the job” not just in the classroom, whilst one of our roundtable guests highlighted how their auditors have attended workshops on wider leadership development topics such as influencing skills and report writing, which is helpful for the audit process but also more generally in their roles.

Self-Reflection: How well does your current auditor training balance technical expertise with soft skills like empathy and communication; and what steps are you taking to create psychological safety during audits?

In summary:

To drive meaningful improvement, EHS audits must move beyond a narrow compliance focus and become strategic, collaborative processes valued by leadership. Technology and AI offer significant opportunities, but their benefits must be balanced with the human element - auditors and auditees - whose curiosity, insight, and empathy shape audit culture. To that end, investing in auditor capabilities remains essential to ensure they have the skills and confidence to lead this evolution.

Whether your next step is strengthening audit culture, defining AI use cases, or investing in auditor development, reach out today to explore how ERM can help you make audits a catalyst for real business value.