People and sustainability

Smart organisations know that sustainability issues such as climate change, the competition for scare resources, and the demographic changes affecting the people agenda are not just going to go away.

Most are also in differing stages of developing viable sustainability strategies and, increasingly, HR professionals need to play a leading role in their successful implementation:

• How well integrated are your environmental or corporate responsibility policies with your people policies?
• Are they enhancing or damaging your brand as an employer?
• Are they helping you to attract and retain talented and pivotal employees?
• How well do they compare to those of your peers and competitors?
• Are your initiatives perceived as simply well meaning, or do they have real impact on the bottom-line?

We know that there are no ‘magic answers’ or ‘one size fits all’ solutions and that’s why we’ve developed our human capital sustainability review programme. It’s an innovative, modular and systematic way of identifying, measuring and facilitating the coherent development of your people sustainability strategies and initiatives.

Potential issues

• Do your employees think your environmental policies are just ‘green washing’ and PR spin?
• Is your organisation having difficulty attracting new recruits, particularly graduates?
• Do you integrate your environmental policies with your induction programmes?
• Do your employees have the opportunity to get involved in community programmes with just your blessing or with real commitment?
• Do your employee reward programmes support your environmental objectives?
• Do you encourage your workforce to come up with innovative ways to integrate sustainability into your products and services?
• Can your employees reduce their travel carbon footprint by telecommuting or video-conferencing?
• Do your leadership development and training programmes support corporate responsibility?
• Are your HR policies compliant with the legal aspects of diversity or environmental issues?
• Do you, or can you, measure the impact of your sustainability programmes?

We can support you by

Wherever you are on the journey of developing your people and sustainability strategies we can help you to:

• map, evaluate, develop and effectively integrate your sustainability programmes from a people perspective
• engage effectively in the broader sustainability agenda of your organisation
• lead the increasingly complex human capital aspects of sustainability
• benchmark and improve the effectiveness of your programmes with other interested parties and peer group organisations
• demonstrate the impact of good practice on the bottom line
• establish the financial case for sound sustainability-led people practices with the board

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