Sustainable HRM: Evolving for the right reasons

SUSTAINABILITY gained importance for companies due to government laws and regulations. Organizations also started to acknowledge their contributions to society and the environment.

The shift led to strategic human resource management's evolution to sustainable human resource management (SuHRM). While the former focuses on ensuring financial outcomes, the latter highlights the need to secure the triple bottom line targets of people, planet and profit. SuHRM practitioners recognized the positive and negative effects of HRM activities, which prompted cultures that explicitly valued sustainability.

SuHRM provides several benefits. It improves sustainability and crisis management. It increases organizational intellectual capital, reputation, innovation, talent acquisition, digitalization, customer satisfaction and financial performance. It intensifies employee performance, loyalty, meaningful work experience, empathy, trust, resilience and advocacy for the company.

Unfortunately, many companies just pretend to practice SuHRM or apply it for the wrong reasons. They employ it solely to increase profit. This shows the need for a paradigm shift where sustainability actually does good. It means valuing, aside from the survival of the company, society and the world because it is the right thing to do.

Employing real sustainability is challenging given that we live in an age of neoliberal capitalism. However, companies can employ several practices toward sustainability.

First, they can create incentives that align with sustainability. This provides a stimulus for micro efforts that can lead to large-scale sustainable outcomes. This also signals employees to take the triple bottom line approach seriously.

Second, companies can provide long-term development and resources for career development. Successful firms promote employee learning and development even during a crisis. This can aid in accelerating company innovation, agility, employee morale, lower attrition and long-term growth.

Third, minimize stress. No work is without stress — even work you fully love. Given this, HR leaders can hone the resilience and stress management capabilities of employees to deal with unavoidable strains. Moreover, designing effective and efficient systems that take physical, emotional and mental harm in consideration can alleviate avoidable pressures.

Fourth is encouraging a caring attitude from managers. Leaders can practice approaches like servant, transformational and adaptive leadership. Emotional intelligence can also make or break teams as employees experience more turbulent times.

Fifth is to practice flexibility. It is a major component of SuHRM and emphasizes marrying the needs of employees and the business. Among the ways companies can be flexible involves working time and location. Return to office mandates have contributed to the Great Resignation. While some argue that employees are just transferring to different companies, attrition still results in profitability, knowledge capital and productivity losses.

These are just some of the ways leaders and decision makers can implement SuHRM. As employees and leaders, we can evaluate if our organization employs real SuHRM. Is it because of legal mandates or profitability? Does the company genuinely care for us and the environment?

Economic performance is no longer the number one priority of businesses. Business sustainability no longer means financial survival, it means the survival not only of the business but also the long-term endurance of society and the planet.

Hannibal George A. Marchan is pursuing his PhD in Business at De La Salle University. His areas of interest include business strategy, operations management, and learning and development. You can reach him at hannibal_marchan@dlsu.edu.ph.

Source: TheManila Times