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Want to Attract Star Employees? The Role of the HR Leader as the Driver of Company Value

Your company’s sustainability commitments help attract the best and the brightest, reduce turnover and enhance productivity. That’s the substance of consistent and compelling research that shows the power of embedding sustainability into corporate culture and its relationship to the bottom line. HR leaders can use this knowledge to create powerful recruitment, engagement and retention strategies.

By Coro Strandberg | Published 8 years ago | About a 3 minute read

The best sustainability plans in the world languish on the shelf unless and until sustainability becomes embedded in the corporate culture. While this job is the responsibility of the board and the CEO, the executive who controls many of the levers is the Chief People Officer and the HR team.

I profile many of these levers in this HR sustainability checklist and whitepaper. The key levers include:

Updating competency models to include sustainability
Including sustainability in the incentive program

Job one for HR? Ensuring both of these culture tools embrace sustainability factors.

The feature image may be a cartoon, but its message is sobering: Global sustainability trends will affect the ability of business to succeed over the next 30 years. To thrive in this new context, current and future leaders will need a host of new skills and competencies.

Leading companies retool their talent management systems to reflect the competencies that will position their firms for future success. As set out in this global research I conducted into sustainability talent management, they define the mission-critical skillsets and mindsets necessary for leaders to create and protect future value for the company and society. Those behaviours, skills and knowledge become embedded in organizational competency models, enabling more objective talent decisions in recruitment and promotion.

A Canadian company with exemplary practices in this area is The Co-operators, a multi-line insurance company consistently ranked one of Canada’s top corporate citizens by Corporate Knights. Among its ten core competencies is “critical thinking,” which includes the need to integrate sustainability principles in all areas of decision-making and familiarity with the foundational concepts of sustainability as set out in its sustainability policy. The “influence” competency includes translating and promoting sustainability principles in decision-making and the “strategic agility” competency includes awareness of sustainability trends affecting the organization. The Co-operators believes that embedding sustainability into its competencies will help foster a similar mindset in the organization.

The company goes further, tying compensation to sustainability performance. All of its top executives have had bonus-able goals since 2011, which continue to drive sustainable progress at the organization. This is in contrast to research I conducted into the sustainable pay practices of large Canadian companies, which revealed few have measurable, bonus-able goals in their short-term incentive plans and none include sustainability in their long-term incentive plans.

To attract and retain top talent, companies must leverage their sustainability commitments as a key business driver. The HR Leader is essential in this bottom line effort.

For more on the role of the HR Leader as the driver of company value, click here.