You Manage It! 2: Ethics/Social Responsibility Embedding Sustainability into HR Strategy
Many companies are now starting to embed their sustainability efforts into their HR programs so these become part of the employees’ everyday life. Companies who adopt this approach believe that this should help employees become engaged in social and environmental causes. A few examples follow:
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▪ Alcatel-Lucent is committed to reducing 50 percent of the company’s carbon emissions by 2020. The company has asked the entire workforce to become involved and take steps, no important how small, to accomplish this ambitious goal. Each department (such as facilities operations, logistics, and information technology) is asked to establish specific emissions reduction objectives for the unit, ensuring employee participation in the process.
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▪ Hitachi has announced a program to actively involve employees in corporate social responsibility activities. A cross-functional committee of employees and HR managers has been asked to help in the development of social responsibility e-learning courses, launch global diversity efforts, and introduce work/life balance initiatives. This committee reports directly to the CEO. The company has also set up employee teams to deal with a wide range of social responsibility practices and policies, from labor safety and business ethics to discrimination prevention and protection of the environment.
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▪ Interface (a maker of modular carpets for commercial, institutional, and residential markets) has introduced a system called Quality Using Employee Suggestions and Teamwork (QUEST) to address contamination and unnecessary waste and to reduce carbon footprints. Employees are actively involved in the process and the company offers educational programs to sensitize employees to these issues. The company also provides incentives for employee suggestions that lead to reduced carbon emissions.
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▪ Pfizer (the world’s largest biopharmaceutical company) has introduced a “Global Corporate Responsibility Network” that brings together Pfizer employees from different parts of the company to set up initiatives concerning a wide array of social-responsibility issues such as disaster response, employee volunteerism, community health, and ethical business practices.
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▪ Pepsi Cola is one of many firms that encourage employees to engage in organic gardening on company premises. For instance, the company has devoted a track of land in its Purchase, New York, facility for this purpose and provides assistance to employees who wish to participate in this effort. Haberman (a public relations firm in Minneapolis) has rented a plot of land for employee organic gardening and this effort generates sufficient food to satisfy the needs of 30 employee families. HomeStreet Bank in Washington has converted a landscape bed into a vegetable garden that employees are encouraged to cultivate during off-hours. TS Designs (a small T-shirt design business) spends $3,000 to $5,000 a year to maintain an organic garden for employees’ use, which includes a beehive as well as a fence to keep out deer and groundhogs.
Critical Thinking Questions
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1-18. Would you like to work for a company that offers the sorts of programs that are described in this case? Would this be an important enticement for you to accept a job in such a company and remain employed there? Explain.
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1-19. Some skeptics argue that most sustainability programs (such as the ones discussed above) represent an insincere attempt to create a positive company image at low cost. Do you agree or disagree? Do you think these types of programs help or hurt the company’s bottom line? Explain.
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1-20. What role, if any, should HR professionals play in helping a company become a leader in sustainability efforts? What specific HR challenges is a company likely to face as it tries to become socially responsible? Explain.
Team Exercise
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1-21. The class is divided into groups of five. Team members are asked to describe the HR challenges firms are likely to face when trying to implement sustainability programs. Specifically, considering the examples given above, the team should discuss the main HR issues that a company should take into account when implementing these types of programs. For instance, some employees may feel subtle pressures to participate in organic gardening even if this is not something that they enjoy doing.
Experiential Exercise: Team
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1-22. The class is divided into groups of five. Each team is asked to role-play a group of employees charged with coming up with a list of HR suggestions to make a hypothetical consumer-products company more environmentally responsible (such as, for instance, providing a bonus for energy savings). Each team will have ten minutes to prepare the list. Depending on class size and available time, the team will present its suggestions to the entire class. The instructor (or another student) will play the role of the HR manager and question the team about the soundness of its recommendations. This will be followed by open class discussion moderated by the instructor.
Experiential Exercise: Individual
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1-23. Examine the Web pages of a sample of large firms (such as those listed by Fortune in its annual rankings of “best companies to work for”) and see if you can identify a particular set of social responsibility programs that involve HR policies. Try to draw some conclusions about the role played by HR, if any, in the implementation of those policies. Also, try to determine the rationale that different companies use for the implementation of these programs.