The term sustainability in staffing has achieved a significant reputation and importance in recent years since the world is shifting to create a conscious corporate culture that values environmental, social, and governance practices among its employees, stakeholders, and everyone associated with the organization.
This approach, as a result, has not only been followed by big Fortune 500 companies but even small businesses are keeping a keen eye on the sustainability side of talent acquisition, which would explicitly help them contribute to the cause of creating a workplace where everyone will be conscious about their part in the ESG environment.
But Why Does Sustainability in Staffing Matter So Much?
The main focus for organizations, when they focus on sustainability, is to reduce their carbon footprint, and ESG also involves diversity and inclusion, where everyone will be given equal opportunity despite their gender, religion, and race, which would help organizations create a thriving culture with people of different origins come together in a workplace, share ideas, paving way for innovation and many more.
And when it comes to talent acquisition, organizations are keen on involving sustainability practices in their recruitment since it is not only about finding the right candidates but also finding candidates who give equal importance to ESG, which automatically puts the organization on the radar among clients or prospects who look to work with people who care about the same.
So, how can an organization be eco-conscious during its talent acquisition process?
There are many ways to do this, and some of the common practices are,
Investing in Greener Office
Investing in an eco-friendly workplace environment can be the first step of an organization in initializing sustainability principles, since reducing the carbon footprint plays an important factor. Evaluating the use of electricity, imposing the use of solar power, reducing water consumption, and encouraging employees to avoid the use of plastic materials inside and outside the office could be a great initiative.
Access to Remote Work When Needed
The pandemic has for sure shifted the way we work since organizations were forced to allow their workforce to work remotely; while at the beginning, it may have slowed down productivity, as time passed, many organizations had an improvement in their productivity and efficiency.
From the ESG perspective, organizations were able to reduce their carbon footprint during those times since there was no need to commute to the office using any kind of transportation. So, even though we are now out of the clutches of COVID-19, there are still organizations that are flexible in providing their employees with remote working options.
Hence, organizations can also use this as a practice to give employees flexibility and an option to do remote work, which would eventually decrease the use of private or office transportation and also decrease the carbon footprint.
But, this solely depends on what the organization thinks; if the organization is not appreciative of remote workforce options, they would have to give additional importance to other practices as a part of their sustainability initiatives.
Less Paper, Less Stress
Before everything became digitalized, talent management involved a lot of documentation using papers, which was hard to store and maintain. And the use of large amounts of paper meant consuming a large portion of natural resources that go into the development of these papers.
But, after digitalization, most organizations have moved towards paperless onboarding practice, eliminating the need for paper to collect employee details and other paper documentation.
Engaging Employees
For an organization to be eco-conscious and speak about eco-consciousness to the public, at first, it should begin from within; the existing employees need to be aware of all the ESG principles and the principles that their organization has currently adopted, which could be few among the many goals of the UN SDG-Goals.
Running environment sustainability programs around their community through a dedicated committee, where employees and business leaders can contribute to the common goal of ESG, could be a game changer, which would put the organization as a leading example among other competitive businesses.
Our continuous contribution towards implementing ESG practices into our business has earned us one of the most prestigious certifications from EcoVadis. Explore ESG Certification.
Key Takeaways
As organizations are slowly evolving towards new business models and practices, being eco-conscious and implementing sustainability practices for better talent acquisition is also an important factor that they need to look into for a prolonged business success, since the outcome would not only benefit the business but change the trajectory of all the people associated with the organization and improve the quality of life.
Want to know about our contribution to Sustainability & ESG? See Our ESG Contributions.