Human Sustainability Management

HUMAN SUSTAINABILITY MANAGEMENT
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(8 June 2011)
Human Sustainability Management
Sustainability and environmental issues have been increasing in the recent past and felt more by organizations. This is because the fundamental patterns of the industrial age are not sustainable. Thus, organizations are integrating sustainability into their daily business practices. Human resource is a kind of sustainability issue and is considered under sustainability management concept. Human sustainability management (HSM) is not a new concept. It has been applied in the business practices of various organizations. It is causing a reassessment in the management of people in organizations. The question that HSM poses to the personnel in the human resource department is whether organizations are managing people for the short-term profit it gets from them or long-term sustainability of the world and future generations.
Some of the characteristics of HSM are that it has great levels of doubt, which should be managed by shared commitment and mutual values. It sustains collaborative interaction in spite of relationship discontinuity that usually exists among various parties. Production of knowledge allows development of trust and commitment with all who are involved. The brand and reputation linked to people being prepared to go the extra mile. Other characteristics of HSM are that it takes into account the naturalism, humanism and rationalism aspects. It embraces holistic perspective elements such as plurality, flexibility, multiplicity, devolution and negotiation. It also has collaborative interaction hence it provides the necessary infrastructure in any organization. It builds social capital in the organization making alliance forming and mutual reciprocation basis easy.
Environmental values are fundamental to any organization’s culture. This is because it provides strong leadership and support and ensures that environmental values are built into all aspects of the company's operations, it implements companywide environmental education system based on Natural Step framework, it establishes policy on grounds of natural step i.e. developed knowledge economy framework. It also ensures that the ‘environmental management’ position is linked with purchaser’s domain. The four step process that Scandic followed to strategically embed environmental practices into the day-to-day activities of the company are increasing the knowledge base for the whole organization. Other changes that the company implemented include the following: It transformed the common framework within the organization by allowing all people to be involved in implementation processes within the local situation, it invoked continuous improvement model of decision-making processes, it increased documentation and monitoring of activities by integrating actions and results. It also established processes to fine tune and set standards.
The core principal that Scandic executives followed which mirrors Benschop and Watson’s comments on the place of SHRM include ‘Integration’ The environmental empowerment program was made central to the company hence the business strategy served as a major platform to fuel creative and inno...