With the increase in changing business environment, the organisations are facing numerous challenges in carrying out their operations. To achieve long-term growth and sustainability, an organisation has to manage its resources such human, capital, and environment. Resolving the sustainability issues benefits society, environment, the company itself by reducing the related business cost, risk of operating the business, and increased brand fame. In order to manage the human resources, the organisation introduced triple bottom line of sustainability by ensuring economic, environment, social value.
The concept of sustainability has become an extensively popular and essential idea to win the trust among the shareholders. Most of the organisations have included sustainability as one of the important driver of their business model. Human resources play a critical role in organisation to create and sustain competitive advantage. A sustained HRM regulates and integrates the HRM practises with the corporate sustainability and formulating the strategies according to organisational objectives (Jerome, 2013).
According to Salvioni & Gennari, (2014), investing in sustainability and CSR (corporate social responsibility) activities can result several benefits to business. A sustainable company is the one, which delivers social, environmental, economic factors to ensure long-term improvement for the society as well as the organisation. The organisations have realised the value of integrating pillars of planet, profit, and people with sustainable development of the organisation. As per the statement of (Wirtz, Pistoia, Ullrich, & Göttel, 2016), in recent days, sustainable organisations are able to manage, balance and handle the conflicts at ease. These conflicts relate to conflicting expectation of various stakeholders such as shareholders, vendors, employees, customers, government, and communities.
According to Luz et al., (2015), the organisation have to accomplish the demand of all the stakeholders by ensuring that the organisation affect the environment positively, create an positive impact on society and environment in which they work, and earn profit to maximum the existing value of capital of shareholders. The importance of fostering the business activities to achieve sustainability was increasingly realised in boardroom meetings. Companies find it difficult to promote sustainability due to conflicting expectations. Certain problems that prevent organisation from implementing the sustainable business practises includes-
As per the statement of Southard, (2014), Lack of support of top-level management, many senior executives see sustainability as an obligation to fulfil the corporate social responsibilities rather than a willingness to become socially responsible. Some leaders work just to earn and achieve the financial benefits rather than establishing a link between the human efforts and social betterment to affect the long-term profits of the organisation. Many companies feel that overlooking the fulfilment of CSR activities would lead to high financial benefits in short term.
According to Mohamed, Ta, Wee, & Goh, (2014), Difficulty in measuring return from sustainability investment- Organisations find it difficult to evaluate and calculate the long-term aspect of sustainability especially when they incur huge cost in building sustainability.
According to Savoia, Stefanovic, & Fragassa, (2016), Limited understanding of sustainability among all levels of management- Usually companies fail to establish and execute the sustainable plans through all the levels of management. There is no relevant communication system among the top management level, employees, alignment, and other functional areas and a proper integration between various stakeholders. Different Stakeholders with different expectation from the organisation result in dilution of achieving the objective of long-term sustainability.
According to Epstein, (2018), if a close observation is undertaken, human resources of organisation plays a catalytic role in changing and facilitating the enforcement of sustainable business practises in the organisation. HR helps the organisation to succeed by implementing sustainable business activities. Although many teams in the organisation commits sustainability, sometimes team members find it difficult to measure, integrate and implement. There are certain critical success factors to implement a sustainable business practises such as creating a sustainable vision and mission, building a united leadership pipeline and creating an appropriate organisational structure and implementing governance mechanism to drive the agenda of sustainability.
According to Savoia, Stefanovic, & Fragassa, (2016), to begin and promote sustainable practises in business, organisation has to lay down the vision and mission, which describes the commitment towards fulfilling sustainable business practises. Organisations should manage and align their leaders to drive the sustainability business actions. Leaders have the responsibility to create the strategy and define the sustainability agenda. Leaders become role models in the eyes of other employees. Moreover, leaders play a key role in becoming and setting a right example for the employees.
As per the statement of Fernando, Wah, & Shaharudin, (2016), it is equally important to align the leadership pipeline with the sustainability philosophy to execute the organisation`s vision. Apart from mentioning the sustainable practises in vision and mission, an organisation must make proper appropriate changes in organisational structure and creates a strong governance mechanism to ensure that there is clear accountability and transparency of proper resources and power, which is allocated to drive the sustainability process.
Epstein, M. J. (2018), the main objective of the organisation is to identify the sustainability goals, report the outcomes to track that sustainability. The role and function of HR is emerging as a driving sustainable practise at all levels of management to create the sustainable HR system in the organisation. Development of key traits of HR can create sustainable HR processes. The sustainable HRM practises affects the overall performance of the organisation. Majorly, there are some instruments on which the performance of the organisation depends such as human resource recruitment, HR marketing, Management and leadership, misemployment, personnel deployment and retainment of staff. A long term and sustainable growth and profitability can be achieved by implementing sustainable HR policy. This policy focuses on implementation of transparent procedures for hiring, recruiting, and retaining, performance management, and motivation.
Stakeholder`s perception always remained a major concern for the organisation. In the age of increasing frauds, coercions, and bribery cases, external stakeholders keep an eye on the operation of the organisation. Moreover, to win the trust of the external stakeholders, an organisation tries to create transparency between the operation and the stakeholders. The activities of company such as Unilever, who set the objective of helping people more than 1 billion people to improve and enhance the health. Companies such as Spencer, Honda, and Marks are highly focused to accomplish their social and environmental business target. Organisation who pursue sustainable business strategy initially may incur huge cost. These organisations pay more than wage rate by investing in protection of environment. To embed sustainability in HR processes, the organisation has to align the activities to HR processes. For example- Value based organisations, which promote employee-volunteering programs for managing HR can position the company in a defensive stage.
Moreover, this sustainable HRM helps in sustaining the dignity of employees especially in case staff reduction but the organisation guarantee employment in the job market. Moreover, the issues related to long-term supply of motivated and highly qualified HR, three main jobs of these highly motivated HR are important for establishing sustainable HRM, design of reward system to give the employees an opportunity to establish the importance of achieving goals from all the employees (Ibidunn, Osibanjo, Adeniji, Salau, & Falola, 2015).
Attaining and achieving organisational goals, strategies, organisational culture is not only the responsibility of a leader. For example- managers introduced a plan to support employee’s families, which can provide essential resources for the employees to generate from work. In order to make the organisation more sustainable, employers will have the need to make investments in sustaining human resource base (Jerome, 2013). Moreover, considering importance of achieving the success of the organisation, the sustainable human resources approach also focuses on objectives, long-term goals in a specific period. Huge cost incurred to render and maintain sustainability, a long-term input is directed to produce a sustainable output. The strategies developed to provide extensive training on maintain sustainability can help the organisation to establish a link between organisational performances and sustainable development plans.
Conclusion
While recognising the importance of value maximisation for the stakeholders, the organisation started focusing on attracting external stakeholders. New ideas to attain sustainable HRM and approach people management. The focus of HRM contributes to achieve financial outcome both in terms financial gain and well as long-term sustainability. HRM policies of business are associated with the performance of business with various HRM tool, which raise the importance of stakeholders in the organisation.
Sustainability offers and establishes a link between the employee`s training and HRM issues. Sustainable human resource development affect the long-term success of organisational performance, which raise awareness for long-term effect from the activities of developing HR. The report has illustrated some examples to demonstrate the importance of achieving sustainable development.
References
Epstein, M. J. (2018). Making sustainability work: Best practices in managing and measuring corporate social, environmental and economic impacts. US: Routledge.
Fernando, Y., Wah, W. X., & Shaharudin, M. S. (2016). Does a firm’s innovation category matter in practising eco-innovation? Evidence from the lens of Malaysia companies practicing green technology. Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management, 27(2), 208-233.
Ibidunn, S., Osibanjo, A. O., Adeniji, A. A., Salau, O. P., & Falola, H. O. (2015). Talent retention and organizational performance: A competitive positioning in Nigerian banking sector. Periodica Polytechnica Social and Management Sciences, 24(1), 1-13.
Jerome, N. (2013). IMPACT OF SUSTAINABLE HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE. International Journal of Asian Social Science, 3(6), 1287-1292.
Kolk, A. (2016). The social responsibility of international business: From ethics and the environment to CSR and sustainable development. Journal of World Business, 51(1), 23-34.
Luz, A. C., Guèze, M., Paneque-Gálvez, J., Pino, J., Macía, M. J., Orta-Martínez, M., & Reyes-García, V. (2015). How does cultural change affect indigenous peoples’ hunting activity? An empirical study among the Tsimane’in the Bolivian Amazon. Conservation and Society, 13(4), 382-394.
Martin, G., Farndale, E., Paauwe, J., & Stiles, P. G. (2016). Corporate governance and strategic human resource management: Four archetypes and proposals for a new approach to corporate sustainability. European Management Journal, 34(1), 22-35.
Mohamed, S., Ta Wee, S., & Goh, K. C. (2014). Participation in acquiring knowledge towards sustainable development at Malaysian local government. International Review of Management and Business Research, 3(3), 1325-1333.
Savoia, M., Stefanovic, M., & Fragassa, C. (2016). MERGING TECHNICAL COMPETENCES AND HUMAN RESOURCES WITH THE AIM AT CONTRIBUTING TO TRANSFORM THE ADRIATIC AREA IN A STABLE HUB FOR A SUSTAINABLE TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT. International Journal for Quality Research, 10(1).
Salvioni D. M. & Gennari, F. (2014). Corporate governance, sustainability and capital markets orientation, International Journal of Management and Sustainability, 3(8), 469-483.
Southard, D. (2014). Rethinking localism in sustainable development practice: The case of development monks in northeast Thailand. Rethink Social Development for Sustainability in the ASEAN Community, 39-52.
Wirtz, B. W., Pistoia, A., Ullrich, S., & Göttel, V. (2016). Business models: Origin, development and future research perspectives. Long range planning, 49(1), 36-54.
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