Human Capital plays a vital role in creating a Culture of Sustainability in the company to maximize Business benefits

?? Building a sustainability culture requires understanding the “why” behind a company’s focus on sustainability.

Companies should expect the approach to integrating sustainability into their cultural DNA to evolve over time. Companies are generally at an early stage in instilling sustainability into their culture - only 13% of companies said that sustainability is deeply embedded in their culture and 75% of employees cite a “sense of ownership” as the most important aspect of a sustainability culture, followed by a clear mission, purpose, and values. The effort to integrate sustainability into the corporation’s culture will require the engagement of each C-suite leader in setting goals that energize employees, allocating resources to support the effort, and modeling behaviors. Both positive ROI (return on investment) and negative ROI (risk of inaction) are critical to build a sustainability culture.

Explaining the negative consequences of failing to change can be a powerful initial motivator that supports the positive case for how increasing the organization’s focus on sustainability will improve the company’s performance in the marketplace, including the markets for products and services, talent, and capital, according to a new interesting research published by The Conference Board with the support from Baker Tilly using data from over 250 executives from 160 companies who met over the span of eight months

?Definition of Sustainability Culture

Researchers defined Sustainable Culture as a marriage of two concepts, sometimes elusive: sustainability and corporate culture.?

Researchers believed the successful union of these 2 concepts - sustainability and culture - requires four building blocks:

1?? Knowledge : developing a shared knowledge of how the company’s business intersects with sustainability.

People at all levels of the organization must understand the company’s business, how it intersects with sustainability, what the key sustainability goals are, why those goals are important, and their role in achieving those goals.

2?? Mindset: having a common mindset that brings sustainability to bear in day-to-day decision-making.

Adjusting the company mindset has both an intellectual component and an emotional one. The intellectual one is understanding what the company is trying to do and why. The emotional one is a sense of ownership.

3?? Capabilities: Capabilities can be viewed as the board and management structures and processes, people, and other resources that enable the company to implement change and embed sustainability into day-to-day operations.

4?? Behavior: promoting the types of behavior from employees, teams, and management, that reinforce the precepts of a shared company purpose.

If capabilities are what the company is good at, cultural behavior is how it gets things done. It involves behaving in a way consistent with the company’s sustainability-related goals.

Researchers found the combination of these elements working together helps create a company-specific sustainability culture.

?“Sense of Ownership” as the most important aspect of a sustainability culture

?? Researchers found that 75% of people cite a “sense of ownership” as the most important aspect of a sustainability culture, followed by a clear mission, purpose, and values. Trust and Inclusiveness came last on this list...

Researchers noticed that several other attributes of a sustainability culture, such as openness to new ideas, collaboration, and being forward looking, all of which are key to innovation. Indeed, an organization with a sustainability culture welcomes not just new ideas but also new ways of doing things.

?The six common priorities to become more sustainable

Researchers has identified six common priorities for companies seeking to become more sustainable:

?? Dealing with the ESG Industry

?? Communicating your sustainability story

??Organizing to execute you sustainability strategy

?? Defining what sustainability means for your organization

?? Integrating sustainability into your business and operations

?? Setting goals

Researchers believed that a sustainability mindset, in which sustainability informs how all employees view business risks and opportunities, has two key elements:

1/ a sense of purpose, why sustainability matters.

2/ a feeling of ownership.

?The critical role of Human Capital

Researchers found that Human Capital function can play a leadership role in three key areas below:

1?? Establish and execute policies and programs that support a sustainability culture in a way that builds upon the company’s existing culture.

Human capital can take the lead in figuring out how to incorporate sustainability into that current roster of attributes and to carry it out through (re) defining job descriptions, leadership traits, recruitment programs, talent development programs, promotions and succession planning criteria, and compensation and benefits.

2?? Provide opportunities for employees at all levels to help create a sustainability culture.?

?Human capital can help think through how to enlist people across and at all levels of the organization to contribute their ideas about what the company can do to advance its sustainability culture, helping to generate the sense of “ownership” that’s so critical.

3?? Ensure that the company focuses on the long-term welfare of its workforce

The human capital function plays the central role in tending to the needs of the company’s workers, including their physical and mental well-being.?

?? Communications also has a major role in building a company’s sustainability culture.?

?How to measure a Sustainable Culture?

Researchers believed that companies can use a mixture of existing and new metrics to track progress:

?? Turnover and retention rates:

Consistently high levels of turnover can undermine or reset the clock on making progress in sustainability—turnover isn’t just an economic cost but an impediment to advancing the knowledge capital necessary to embed sustainability into an organization.

?? Employee understanding and engagement:

Companies may add specific questions to employee engagement questionnaires. While surveys can reveal a degree of clarity or an acknowledgment (or endorsement) of the company’s sustainability culture, it is important to remember that they are attitudinal, not behavioral. Robust data can be derived by examining what employees are already doing in building a sustainability culture, such as volunteering, contributing to charitable organizations, or participating in an employee resource group or a sustainability.

?Who is responsible for a Sustainable culture?

Researchers noticed that 30% of the working group participants cite the CEO as best suited to lead the accompanying cultural transformation of the organization, followed by 28% who cite those responsible for the company’s business strategy and operations.

These figures underscore the importance of linking sustainability and cultural change to the execution of the company’s business strategy.

Thank you ?? The Conference Board ??researchers team for these insightful findings:? Lindsay Beltzer Paul Washington Steve Odland

Dave Ulrich?George Kemish LLM MCMI MIC MIoL

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