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How to Create a Sustainable - Green - HR Function
11 August 2009:
In December 2008, Green Tech Media offered their list of the top ten green jobs of the future. Number two on their list was Sustainability Officer. They say that this is a newly created corporate position. Companies will need to make choices about how to reduce their carbon footprint as well as make their products and services more green.
So, what is a Sustainability Officer? Here is my first pass at what an HR sustainability role would look like and the process HR would undertake in order to “greenify” their company.
Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities (KSAs)
Once the organization establishes that social responsibility and sustainability is important to their business strategy, they must define what this will mean to the company. Once this is defined, it will need to be incorporated into the company’s vision, mission, values as well as touted in their marketing materials, website, and all communication vehicles. No easy task here, but assigning the deliverable to one job function actually makes quite a bit of sense.
The role would be highly visible and would have to form strong communication channels, both internally and externally, so some good PR and platform delivery skills would be required. The person filling the role will need to be a team player with an exceptional attention to detail. Dealing with all the related functions to get the messages created and delivered will be challenging enough, so a good team approach and an ability to influence others will be a must.
A sustainability officer need not have 100 years experience in that one industry, but should understand the business as a business - possessing solid business acumen and be able to connect the soft skill and process dots to hard dollars. Finance background is always good, but we know most HR folks go into HR so they don’t have to deal with numbers all day long! (Side note here: that perception sure is changing!)
Relating to finance, the sustainability officer will be responsible to identify the current carbon footprint. While there are websites that can help you do this, such as www.carbonfootprint.com, this also will take savvy communication and collaboration skills to interface with all functions with in the organization. This is not a “nice to have” activity, it is the wave of the future and a way for HR to align themselves more closely with the CFO and financial accountability.
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Source: Lizz Pellet, Fellow Johns Hopkins University and CEO of EMERGE International