“When organisations decide to implement a Sustainable Living Plan, they agree to embark on one of the most ambitious transformational change imaginable.  This means that no corner of their business will remain unaffected and consequently, all employees will need to think and act differently,” stated Alexandra Stubbings, a faculty member and OD consultant at Ashridge Business School where she leads the Sustainability and Change Practice.

This was the topic of a research conducted at Ashridge last year, were it was found that there are a number of listed corporations who are making claims to be “embedding sustainability”, although it is hard to manage a sustainable balance between economic prosperity, environmental integrity and social purpose. Stubbings ponders about the organisational implications of such claims and of the role of HR professionals in delivering them.

The organisational implications are far from simple. Not only operation wise, through the development of more sustainable products and services, but also strategically and culturally. It is opportune to say that embedding sustainability cannot be achieved by any organisation in isolation. It requires sensitive interaction and affiliation with suppliers, customers, communities and beyond. External factors and the organisation’s relationship to these, is paramount. One has to take into consideration that in today’s world everyone in hyper-connected. social networks like Twitter and Facebook provide a window to the world straight into your business. This means that misalignment between a business strategy and action can raise alarm bells that echo around this virtual spectrum, denting reputations and injuring the employee’s value proposition.

Meeting the needs of this new context requires a more diffused relationship among stakeholders, where meetings are conducted in an ever more transparent and connected environment. This in turn necessitates new skills and capabilities, new organisational structures, new values and cultural norms, new behaviours and performance. In essence, the entire employee lifecycle is affected.

Clearly HR professionals have a crucial role to play in delivering this strategic and visible change, explains Stubbings. Not only because the handling of people management is vital in shifting individual and collective focus, but also because this is where valuable learning and change capability resides. Sustainability and strategy requires work in five key domains in which HR can surely make a difference.

 

Performance management and reward

These are achievable within the scope of the business, since the alterations to individual’s objectives are well-known and effective methods for shifting individual behaviour. Objectives may now start to include simple quantitative measures such as material reduction, encouraging socially focused innovation, designing less energy intensive production systems, which are all valuable in themselves. But when it comes to embedding sustainability individual objectives do not go far enough, explains Stubbings. Most of the problems that need to be solved require complex interactions between a number of actors. Below the senior management level, it is progressively harder to set personal objectives when responsibility for delivery is diffused. Designing more sophisticated performance management systems that, by rewarding team innovation and experimentation, encouraging horizontal alignment across functions and promoting the sharing of learning and positive social values will all contribute significantly to fostering sustainability, appropriate behaviours and action.

 

Employee value proposition

There is increasing evidence that shows the positive effect on employee engagement that sustainability brings about. Working for an ethical and socially conscious business is a powerful attractor, particularly to the Generation Y workforce, according to Ashridge’s research. And this works both ways since by building a reputation for sustainability attracts creative and thoughtful talent to the business. Such talent in turn develops further strategic and sustainable solutions for the business; creating an important feedback loop that strengthens organisational resilience. This risk-taking element is a crucial part of a new cultural approach that would definitely put any business in a better position to secure talent, which will support the business transformation and innovation

 

Organisational learning

There are various business schools that integrate sessions on sustainability into their leadership and development programmes or even design stand-alone programmes on the subject.  This is the result of the fact that certain critical skills are needed everywhere. Stubbings says these skills include: heightened sensitivity to external factors and the ability to make sense of them; appreciating interconnections in systems and the effects they have; building relationships with internal and external partners; awareness of the consequences of our choices; developing an enhanced sense of personal purpose and values; co-designing innovative strategies. What is learnt builds the capacities that can be embedded into existing development programmes, although they also offer the opportunity to any business to reflect on the development needs of its workforce.

 

Employee and stakeholder engagement

In this increasingly connected and contractually complex world, it is not so easy to separate employees from customers, from investors or suppliers. As a matter of fact, in large businesses one individual could easily play all of these roles.  So why do we still differentiate our engagement strategies so conspicuously? Embedding sustainability offers an ideal agenda for bringing together stakeholders, both from inside and outside the organisation, while building alignment that produces tangible value as well as positivity and inclusion.  When employees, customers and suppliers are brought together with a common purpose, especially one with a higher purpose such as ethical consumption, a whole wave of energetic new potential is unleashed. This collaborative engagement can build new strong values and as a consequence set in motion the new high participation, values-led initiatives.

 

Cultural change

Various businesses have been engaging staff, suppliers, local communities and customers around the world to explore how they can collaboratively develop solutions to target local societal problems. These businesses are becoming more inclusive, engaging and inspiring businesses that increasingly values the ‘triple bottom line’ (suppliers, customers and communities) in their culture. Without any doubt, increasing environmental and social sensitivity can profoundly affect organisational culture. And really and truly, emphasises Stubbings, embedding sustainability has to cause modifications in the organisational culture because of the mind-set and behavioural change it requires. Cultures that promote external focus, experimentation, values-led innovation and cross-functional collaboration will win out as competition for resources continues to heat up.  How the people strategy and HR’s role supports or inhibits that cultural change is a key strategic question that will continuously be asked.

The concerns arising from the implications of economic volatility, resource constraints and social unrest are collectively shifting these issues up the executive agenda. This comes as no surprise since the last few years have seen the swift rise of the specialist sustainability function in response. There is a lot that HR professionals can do in collaboration with such specialists to build organisational resilience and benefit from the reputational advantages that result from sustainability. Perhaps it would add to the sustainability of the HR function as well.