HUMAN RESOURCES FEATURE What Do HR and Sustainability Have to Do with One Another?

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BOB BETHEL VP of HR & Learning Services

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Here are a few ways that HR and sustainability are connected that may be helpful to remember when trying to reshape policies.

Sustainability Affects Morale

Companies that focus on sustainability are often viewed more favorably by the public, which can affect the way that employees feel about working for your company and even the way that customers or clients feel about interacting with your company. Making an effort to mitigate the negative effects that your company has on the environment in turn makes customers and employees feel like they are making a difference.

Touting sustainability as a core value may also help to attract top talent. Many of the best and brightest across every industry are interested in working for companies that put ethics over profit and work to create a better world. This may enrich the talent pool, helping to raise recruiting standards and build better teams.

HR Is Poised to Integrate Sustainability

HR can set the momentum for the adoption of more sustainable practices. Since recruitment, onboarding, and training are integral functions of HR, HR professionals can make sure that sustainability is ingrained into new employees’ view of the company from the start. Talking about reducing waste throughout onboarding and training can help to set the foundations for more sustainable practices.

HR can also encourage sustainable practices throughout employee lifecycles and daily tasks. By helping to set up software that takes care of things like time and attendance tracking, scheduling, succession planning, and goal setting, HR professionals can help to save paper while improving efficiency within the organization.

Besides preaching about sustainability and implementing more sustainable systems, HR can also help to engage employees with sustainability by introducing programs or asking for employee feedback and ideas. When employees are really living sustainability, you can feel comfortable knowing that they are doing their part to minimize waste within your company, as well.

HR Practices Have an Impact

HR practices can have a big impact on the sustainability of a company. By recording employee information electronically into an HRIS database, paper, supplies, and space can be saved. Depending on the structure of the company, it may be possible to use a smaller space and in turn use less energy as a result of the space savings, further progressing sustainability goals.

By working to continuously decrease the amount of resources used in every aspect of HR, HR professionals can reduce a company’s carbon footprint substantially.

Why Integrate Sustainability?

Developing more sustainable practices is important to ensure a clean future Earth, healthy and happy employees, and many other touchy-feely issues that some business leaders brush off. However, sustainability is good business. When your employees truly care about mitigating waste and improving the efficiency of your business, it can pay off in dollars.

Sustainability is something that every forward-thinking company should be at least considering when it comes to developing strategies for improvement and growth. Sustainability is truly the future.

Source: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/behavioral-competencies/ ethical-practice/pages/sustainabilitystrategy.aspx

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