General Electric’s Focus on Environment, Health, and Safety

General Electric has committed itself to achieve environmental, health, and safety goals in all of its global operations. The highly diversified company has adopted a single standard program for environment, health, and safety (EHS) that is meant to comply with all laws and regulations as well as company policies for behavior-based-safety, to reduce the risk of injury to employees and contractors, avoid chemical harm to the environment, refine the EHS program, and uphold the GE brand integrity (General Electric, p. 2). In order to manage these goals in light of the diversity, EHS consideration is employed through “operational ownership” to make it a function of all positions (p. 3). The company has also created a system to test and refine its EHS goals and procedures through monitoring people and organizational performance (p. 4). Performance interventions are considered when the company's needs are not being met.

The benefits of this system include having collaboration and shared expectations instilled in the company culture across networks, departments, and physical offices. According to Anderson (2012), cultural values must be strongly instilled in a company in order for it to effectively be carried across networks (p. 263). GE’s commitment to making EHS consideration part of everyone’s job will help maintain quality control. One setback is that it creates redundancy, and having people focus on different aspects of their job can create issues of subjective consideration and application of EHS standards within the company. Also, these initiatives can be costly and inefficient if not constantly evolved, which requires training the entire system of participants and operational owners.

References

Anderson, D. (2012). Organization development: The process of leading organizational change. Los Angeles: Sage.

General Electric. (n.d.). Environment, health and safety at GE. Retrieved from http://www.ge.com