Why Make a Regulatory Compliance Calendar

I’m a planner – I love to plan! Planning helps me efficiently prioritize my work, manage risks, and achieve my goals. As environmental professionals, we repeat many of our tasks year after year, making them especially well-suited to planning. Creating a regulatory compliance callendar is a great way to plan out your year.

Federal and provincial regulations often require us to submit annual or biannual reports. ISO 14001 entails numerous yearly tasks like management reviews, aspects reviews, and goal setting. Alongside these, you might support new projects to ensure they comply with environmental standards, conduct staff training, and perhaps even plan a vacation or two this year!

I highly recommend setting aside a day or two to plan these annual tasks. Some dates are fixed; for instance, you must submit NPRI reports by June 1st, regardless if you’re traveling to Ottawa in May for the tulip festival! (If you’ve never been to Ottawa’s tulip festival, I highly recommend you go; it’s the best way to officially welcome summer in Ontario.) Other dates are more flexible. You can schedule training, for example, around your and your coworkers’ availability. Early spring and late fall are ideal times for training since fewer people take vacations then.

How to Make a Regulatory Compliance Calendar

This plan of what needs to be done and when to achieve regulatory compliance is your Environmental Compliance Calendar. How you organize these tasks is up to you. For smaller organizations, a simple “to-do” list taped to your office wall works wonders. For more complex organizations, utilizing Outlook might be more effective. One of the advantages of Outlook is that you not only schedule when the work is due, but you can also book time to do the work. Another option is MS Teams, which has a handy task function that’s especially useful forteam-based work.

Contact us today to learn more about implementing a compliance calandar at your organization.