The term "human sustainability" is recent in the corporate world, but its meaning is not new. Assuming that people — consumers, suppliers, partners, leadership and, mainly, collaborators — are at the center of organizations, a paradigm shift must occur for the human capital of organizations to be seen and valued
According to the 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 on how the organizations themselves can benefit those people. That is to say, it is a new approach in which companies begin to create a sustainable corporate environment, allowing individuals to perform 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 gathered from interviews with leaders, there is a gap between those who recognize the importance of this topic and those who practice it in their daily lives. In the research, 76% of respondents stated that they consider human sustainability important for the business, but only 46% reported implementing any measures regarding it, while another 10% already invest in large-cap stocks
So, how to put it into practice? The CEO of CKZ Diversidade and author of the book "Unconscious Bias", Cris Kerr, explain that the first and most important step is to measure the impacts of a poor corporate environment on people, the company's results, and how much it costs, in the end, absenteeism, demotivation, low productivity, the turnover, the consultancies and the training sessions
One of the challenges for human sustainability is that there is still a focus only on technical results within companies, and thus people are evaluated. I remember a training I gave to an HR team about how the work environment can influence hormonal fluctuations. Right after, two people resigned from this company, and the leaders brought complaints to me. My response was that the problem was not the training or the people, but very likely the leadership itself, comment on 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, in performing this role, present divergences in behavioral aspects. Many times, managers forget the importance of having one-on-one meetings, to provide constant feedback and to create a welcoming environment, of empathy and inclusion. Instead, the focus remains solely on the pressure for results
In another example, a leader who was participating in a training told me that she had many problems with the people on her team, both men and women were not performing well. I asked: 'do you have meetings with them? There are one-to-one moments?’. The person replied: 'I hold meetings once with the whole team and I always say that, if you have something urgent, they can look for me, account
The CEO of CKZ adds that many times, erroneously, managers convey an idea that they are super busy, that do not have time for trivial matters. In this way, your teams end up preferring to do the wrong tasks rather than talk and clarify their doubts. "This leadership did not do this for being a bad person", but out of habit and because the organization never looked at her behavioral profile. That's why, it is essential to provide training for inclusive leadership, in addition to including in performance evaluations, 360 feedback, in which all people are evaluated by all levels of the hierarchy, in an equal manner, complete Cris
"Furthermore, involves daily use of more expressions like 'congratulations on the delivery' and 'thank you for the work'. Or, if the task needs adjustments, say that 'we need to correct our course a bit', let's work together on this. The culture of a company is, mainly, the way people behave. That's why, human sustainability must be measured and set as a goal in order to ensure a healthy environment so that people can return home better than when they arrived at work, finalizes the specialist
Therefore, human sustainability is directly related to the way companies treat the people in their business. This involves a deep reassessment of the behavioral performance metrics of leadership and the impacts of turnover and absenteeism on the company's finances
