HR’s Contributions to Sustainability

A survey of the research that has been conducted on the contributions of the human resources (“HR”) function to sustainability initiatives reveals certain common themes that company leaders can refer to in creating a list of duties and responsibilities for HR and measuring HRs performance and effectiveness in promoting sustainability throughout the organization and in relationships with external stakeholders.  The areas that are most frequently brought up include the following:

• Leadership Development: Creating and offering sustainability-focused leadership development opportunities for high potential employees.
• Training and Development: Educating employees about sustainable development and designing and implementing training programs to help employees upgrade their competencies on the skills required to carry out the company’s sustainability projects and improve their own long-term prospects as a participant in the broader job market
• Diversity and Multiculturalism: Developing diversity policies and procedures and supporting creation of an inclusive organizational culture and multicultural workplace
• Ethics and Governance: Developing and implementing policies and performance standards relating to ethics and governance including ethics and compliance training programs that cover sustainability and values
• Talent Management:  Recruiting people with the right functional expertise and mental models to add value to the company’s sustainability initiatives, a task made easier as the company is branded as being a sustainable business and “doing the right thing”
• Workforce Engagement: Acting as “sustainability champions” and getting employees engaged and involved in a company’s journey to sustainability by promoting a sense of commitment and passion to make a difference throughout the workforce
• Change Management:  Providing personal counseling and education to organizational leaders on how manage change and create, promote and distribute a new “sustainability culture”
• Collaboration and Teamwork: Managing the cross-functional collaborative teams that are an important part of sustainability initiatives within organizations, creating communities of practice among different departments and building relationships with key external stakeholders such as community groups and NGOs
• Creating and Inculcating Values:  Creating and inculcating the sustainable values that serve as the foundation for developing and maintaining a sustainable business including promotion of a “sustainable mindset” among workers
• Policies and Procedures:  Ensuring that HR-related policies and procedures integrate sustainability-related factors to support the company’s sustainability initiatives with particular emphasis on job descriptions and core competencies, recruitment and promotion, job assignments, rewards and recognition and performance evaluation
• Socially Responsible Employment: Ensuring that the company complies with and exceeds legal and higher voluntary standards relating to terms and conditions of employment for their employees and contractors and using the company’s leverage to cause key business partners (e.g., suppliers) to do the same
• Performance Measurement: Participating in the development and implementation of processes (e.g., metrics and data collection methods and tools) for monitoring the company’s progress toward its sustainability goals and objectives and the progress of individual employees toward their own personal development goals

In order for HR leaders to be effective and successful in each of the areas mentioned above they need to gain the trust and confidence of other organizational leaders so that the HR function is welcomed as a key participant in the formulation and implementation of sustainability strategies and initiatives.  While this sounds like a sensible approach, there is still an entrenched belief that the role of the HR department should be strictly limited to processing paperwork and complying with applicable laws and regulations.  At the same time, HR personnel need to be thinking about sustainability whenever they interact with employees and be mindful of the linkages among the listed areas.  For example, data on employee performance against sustainability-related metrics should not only be used for purposes of compensation and rewards but also should be factored into decisions about the tasks assigned to the employee and the details of his or her specific training and development program.  In order for the HR function to have the most impact, steps must be taken to educate and train people within the function on how to incorporate sustainability into the roles for which they have previously been trained.

The list above makes it clear that sustainable human resource management touches on a wide range of issues and activities—recruitment, training, organizational culture and change, compliance, performance measurement, team and project management etc.—and companies must develop an organized approach that can be tracked and explained to employees and external stakeholders.  The process should begin with a directors’ meeting dedicated to the company’s “people” to discuss all of the subjects listed above with members of the executive team.  Everyone needs to understand the current situation and a consensus needs to be reached on where the company needs to go and the resources and support that will be needed to get there.  The next step is to create a smaller group led by one member of the board assigned to monitor organizational development, the CEO and the member of the executive team responsible for HR to work out the details of the strategies and tactics that will be deployed in each of the areas.  The group should include specialists in the relevant areas as well as representatives of workers from throughout the organization since participation is a fundamental principle of sustainability and essential in order for workers to perceive the company’s efforts as genuine.

This article is an excerpt from the author’s chapter on Sustainable Human Resources Management, which is part of the materials available at the website of the Sustainable Entrepreneurship Project.

Sources: S. Bäbler, Human Resource Management and Environmental Sustainability (Zurich: Institut für Strategie‐ und Unternehmensökonomik at University of Zurich, 2010); P. De Prins, L. Van Beirendonck, A. De Vos and Jesse Segers, “Sustainable HRM: Bridging theory and practice through the ‘Respect Openness Continuity (ROC)’-model”, Management Revue, 25(4) (2014), 263; P. Hohnen (Author) and J. Potts (Editor), Corporate Social Responsibility: An Implementation Guide for Business (Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada: International Institute for Sustainable Development, 2007), 30-31; H. Schroeder, “The Importance of Human Resource Management in Strategic Sustainability: An Art and Science Perspective”, Journal of Environmental Sustainability, 2(2) (2012), Article 4, 75; J. Wirtenberg, J. Harmon, W. Russell and K. Fairfield, “HR’s role in building a sustainable enterprise: insights from some of the world’s best companies”, Human Resource Planning, 30(1) (2007), 10.