Human sustainability: what is it and why does your company need to put it into practice?

The term “human sustainability” is recent in the corporate world, but its meaning is not new. Assuming that people — consumers, suppliers, partners, leaders and, above all, employees — are at the center of organizations, a paradigm shift must happen so that the human capital of organizations is seen and valued.

According to global consulting firm Deloitte, human sustainability can be defined as the need for organizations to focus less on how people can benefit them and more about how organizations themselves can benefit these people. In other words, it is a new approach in which companies start to create a sustainable corporate environment, allowing individuals to play their roles in the best possible way. In this way, this organizational transformation ends up strengthening, indirectly, the sustainability of the business itself.

According to the data collected from interviews with leaders, there is a gap between those who recognize the importance of this topic and those who exercise it on a daily basis. In the survey, 76% of respondents stated that they considered human sustainability important for the business, but only 46% reported being implementing some measure about it, while another 10% already invests in large actions.

So how to put it into practice? The CEO of CKZ Diversidade and author of the book “Viés Unconsciente”, Cris Kerr, explains that the first and most important step is to measure what are the impacts of a bad corporate environment for people in the company's results and how much, in the end, absenteeism, demotivation, low productivity, turnover, consulting and training costs.

“ One of the challenges for human sustainability is that a look is still privileged only for the technical results within companies and thus people are evaluated. I remember training I gave to an HR team about how the work environment can influence hormonal discharges. Soon after, two people resigned from this company, and the leaders brought complaints to me. My answer was that the problem was not training or people, but most likely leadership itself”, comments the specialist and pioneer in DIEP – diversity, inclusion, equity and belonging.

According to Cris Kerr, it is common for people to reach leadership positions due to their technical qualities and, by playing this role, presenting differences in behavioral terms. Often, managers forget the importance of having individual meetings, giving constant feedback and creating a welcoming environment, of empathy and inclusion. Instead, the focus is on the pressure for results.

“ In another example, a leadership who participated in a training told me that they had a lot of problems with the people on their team, both men and women were not performing well. Then I asked: ‘Do you have meetings with them? Do you have one-to-one moments?’. The person replied: ‘I have meetings once with the whole team and I always say that if they have something urgent, they can look for me’’, he says.

The CKZ CEO adds that often, mistakenly, managers convey an idea that they are super busy, that they don't have time for trivial matters. That way, your teams end up preferring to do the wrong tasks than talking and clearing up your doubts. “This leadership didn't do that because it was someone bad, but because of the habit and because the organization never looked at her behavioral profile. Therefore, it is essential to bring training to inclusive leadership, in addition to including in performance evaluations, the 360 feedback, in which all people are evaluated by all levels of the hierarchy, equally”, completes Cris.

“In addition, it involves daily life like using more expressions like ‘congratulations for the delivery’ and ‘thank you for the work’. Or, if the task needs adjustments, say that ‘we need to correct the route a little, let's work together on it’. A company's culture is mainly the way people behave. Therefore, human sustainability must be measured and placed as a goal in order to ensure a healthy environment so that people can return home better than when they got to work”, concludes the specialist.

Therefore, human sustainability is directly related to the way companies treat people in their business. This goes through a deep look at the reassessment of the leadership's behavioral performance metrics and the impacts of turnover and absenteeism for the company's finances.