The term "human sustainability" is recent in the corporate world, but its meaning is not new. Starting from the principle that people — consumers, suppliers, partners, leaders, and especially employees — are at the center of organizations, a paradigm shift must occur for the organization's human capital to be recognized 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 these people. In other words, it is a new approach in which companies create a sustainable corporate environment, allowing individuals to perform their roles in the best possible way. In this way, this organizational transformation ends up indirectly strengthening the sustainability of the business itself.
According to data collected 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 survey, 76% of respondents stated that human sustainability is important for the business, but only 46% reported implementing some measure in this regard, while another 10% are already investing in large-scale actions.
So, how to put it into practice? The CEO of CKZ Diversity and author of the book "Unconscious Bias," Cris Kerr, explains that the first and most important step is to measure the impacts of a poor corporate environment on people's results and how much, in the end, absenteeism, demotivation, low productivity, turnover, consulting, and training cost.
“One of the challenges for human sustainability is that companies still focus solely on technical results, which is how people are evaluated. I remember a training session I gave to an HR team on how the work environment can influence hormonal releases. Soon after, two people resigned from the company, and the leaders complained to me. My response was that the problem was not the training or the people, but most likely the leadership itself,” says 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, when performing this role, to exhibit differences in behavioral aspects. Often, managers forget the importance of holding one-on-one meetings, providing constant feedback, and creating a welcoming environment of empathy and inclusion. Instead, the focus remains solely on the pressure for results.
In another example, a leader participating in a training told me that she had many problems with the people on her team, both men and women, who were not performing well. I asked: "Do you have meetings with them? Are there one-on-one moments?" The person replied: "I hold meetings with the entire team once and always say that if they have anything urgent, they can reach out to me," she says.
The CEO of CKZ adds that, often mistakenly, managers convey the idea that they are super busy and do not have time for trivial matters. In this way, their teams end up preferring to do the wrong tasks rather than speak up and ask questions. "This leadership was not doing this because they are a bad person, but out of habit and because the organization never looked at their behavioral profile. Therefore, it is essential to bring inclusive leadership training, as well as include 360-degree feedback in performance evaluations, where everyone is evaluated by all levels of the hierarchy in an egalitarian manner," Cris concludes.
“In addition, it involves daily tasks such as using more expressions like ‘congratulations on the delivery’ and ‘thank you for your work’. Or, if the task needs adjustments, saying that ‘we need to correct the course a little, let’s work on it together’. A company’s culture is, above all, the way people behave. Therefore, human sustainability must be measured and set as a goal in order to guarantee a healthy environment so that people can return home better than when they arrived at work”, concludes the specialist.
Therefore, human sustainability is directly related to the way companies treat the people in their business. This involves a thorough reassessment of the behavioral performance metrics of leadership and the impacts of turnover and absenteeism on the company's finances.
