Podcast | Rethinking Sustainability: The Role Of HR, L&D, And People Teams

Author:
Gary Stringer
PUBLISHED ON:
October 29, 2024
PUBLISHED IN:

Sustainability isn’t driven through volunteering days, one-size approaches, and top-down mandates!

But by bringing social impact into people’s day-to-day roles, giving people the right skills, and empowering them from the bottom-up.

Liv Sibony joins us to explain how we shift from the former to the latter in this episode.

Expect to learn how you zoom out to get more context, using that to make better decisions, how to imagine a more hopeful future, how to build a top-down and bottom-up approach, and more.


Watch the episode

Video Timestamps


0:00 Intro to Liv Sibony
1:12 Why employees want purpose and social impact
5:10 Are quick wins really the right idea?
12:58 The issue with volunteering days
21:06 3 practical ideas for HR and L&D
27:03 A bottom-up and top-down approach
32:30 The overlap between L&D and sustainability
36:00 Imagining a more hopeful future

Listen to the episode

Audio Timestamps


0:00 Intro to Liv Sibony
2:13 Why employees want purpose and social impact
6:11 Are quick wins really the right idea?
13:58 The issue with volunteering days
22:53 3 practical ideas for HR and L&D
28:44 A bottom-up and top-down approach
34:17 The overlap between L&D and sustainability
37:42 Imagining a more hopeful future

Four lessons on tackling sustainability in HR and L&D

1. Think about the problem you’re actually trying to solve before you make a snap decision.


When a quick-win decision seems appealing, it’s easy to take it! But if we really want to shift toward sustainability, we need to take a step back, understand the context or ecosystem we’re part of, and make our decisions based on that.

Imagine you’re running a coffee shop and decide to replace your cups with ‘so-called’ biodegradable cups. This is a well-meaning solution, but doesn’t actually solve the problem.

Because we’re still incentivising throwaway behaviour and contributing to the usage of resources.

“Actually, you might think that the value you're offering is the best possible cup of coffee, and you might incentivise people to just simply take a seat, have a coffee, and really enjoy that for the moment.

“Or if you really have to take it away, give someone a discount for using a reusable coffee cup or… I've seen rent-a-cup coffee schemes. So you could potentially pay a deposit on the cup and then bring it back later and get your money back.”

2. You probably need to re-think your volunteering or CSR days.


The question we should be asking is: where do we really want to make an impact as an organisation?

“You can go, okay, well, let's have a day where all of our employees get involved in the community. But actually, how is it linked to the greater vision of the world that we are working towards?”

Liv shared her experiences working in a financial organisation, and what those volunteering days meant to her:

“We're a big bank and we used to go and paint community walls. Now, if you saw my painting skills, those poor people, I mean, they would have had to actually get it repainted. 

“So, not only did they waste time and money on getting someone like me to paint it, I had really deep HR skills that I could have applied to the community and I would have felt a lot better equipped, a lot better for myself to have used these skills for the better good, and the community would have benefited a lot more.”

3. We need a bottom-up AND top-down approach.


“I think it's inevitable that we need direction from the top in order to commit to this change, but… I think it needs to be delivered from the bottom-up.

“At a strategic level, there definitely needs to be some commitment and some buy-in and then empower all of your employees to go, okay, this is the direction we believe we're going in, this is our guiding star - how do you think you can contribute to this?”

We establish the overall direction and long-term play at the top, but the change to make it happen will be more effective if people are empowered from the bottom up to make it work!

4. Want to envision a better future? Try this exercise.


“Essentially, you just get everyone to close their eyes, and you get them to imagine [an ideal future], and it's really important to think about it in the context of the system you operate in. 

“You use that system and take people through a visioning exercise where they're imagining the bigger world that they live in. 

“For example, you help them imagine the community they live in, help them imagine where the food comes from, help them imagine what the neighbourhood is like.

“You ask them different, probing questions that help them visualise or feel or tap into any of the senses that most resonate with them - on all of the context of that system so that they can really embody those feelings and that vision of theirs.”

If you’re looking for an exercise you can follow, Liv recommended Envisioning A Sustainable World by Donella Meadows.