A recent survey* found that retaining employees and keeping skilled talent is the top challenge for organisations across the UK (cited by 51% of 300 surveyed HR professionals).  There are a myriad of reasons for this, and every sector will be different. However much of it can be traced back to Covid, during which employees had time to reflect and question their jobs and careers, particularly whether their work felt meaningful or whether they believed in their organisation’s purpose. (McKinsey, 2020 & 2022)

For millennials and Gen Zs these are particularly important issues as indicated in a recent report from Deloitte. In the report, 62% of Gen Zs and 59% of millennials reported having felt anxious or worried about climate change in the previous month.  Protecting the environment was cited as the societal challenge where they felt businesses had the greatest opportunity to drive change. These feelings are reflected in their career decisions with two in 10 Gen Zs and millennials already having changed jobs or industries to better align their work with their environmental values, with another quarter of both cohorts planning to do so in the future.

These are not insignificant findings for HR directors facing the challenge of retaining employees – especially in a challenging financial climate where the cost of replacing a salaried employee is estimated at 6-9 months salary (Society for Human Resource Management). Couple this with the fact that, according to the Financial Times, employees of environmentally friendly companies accept 9% – 15% lower salaries and we think there is a very compelling case for HR directors to consider leveraging a sustainability strategy within their HR strategy.

As programme designers and trainers who have collaborated on a significant number of employee engagement projects it seems to us that there is huge potential in HR tapping into their companies’ sustainability strategies in an effort to support employee retention. Yet few are doing so – with the top 3 barriers being cited as:

1. Bandwidth: As the economic downturn bites, HR teams are having to make cuts resulting in existing members taking on heavier work loads. Having to do more with fewer resources leaves little time to come up with fresh thinking or new retention strategies. So the collaboration opportunity is rarely recognised.
2. Knowledge: Sustainability is not a core HR competence and is a relatively deep, broad and intimidating topic to understand and leverage effectively…this will take time….see point 1.
3. Risk: Greenwashing is live and kicking in corporate environments. Just look at the recent backlash regarding Starbucks new CEO and his 1,000 mile commute. Such behaviour leads to disgruntled employees calling out double standards, which could negatively impact hard won internal HR credibility if they were associated with sustainability initiatives.

However sustainability can be a powerful weapon in the battle for employee retention and one that should not be ignored.  The vast majority of Chief Sustainability Officers (CSOs) that we speak to are keen to collaborate with other departments for support in their journey to achieve ambitious targets. And like every HR director or Chief People Officer, every CSO and their department is understaffed and under-resourced.  They are desperately seeking sustainability advocates in their organisations to deliver much needed momentum and scale for their initiatives. They can’t do it alone.

A HR and CSO collaboration would seem to us to be an obvious choice – a mutually beneficial collaboration to achieve multiple sets of targets for two key reasons:

1. Given HR’s people development and management role they are responsible for and the conduit to engaging employees in a credible and scalable way. They are therefore the perfect partner to help enable CSOs to leverage both sustainability incentives and KPIs in driving engagement to achieve sustainability goals, and simultaneously leverage another avenue to drive employee engagement.
2. Evidence shows that such collaborations can deliver sizeable sustainability impact: a recent study showing that HR initiatives can enable individual employees to reduce their annual greenhouse gas emissions by 16% (Oracle 2022). In fact the importance of HR in the sustainability journey is so significant it has been given a name by sustainability professionals: GreenHR, defined as ‘focusing on the development, implementation and maintenance of all activities aimed at making staff members supportive and committed to sustainable goals’. (O’Donohue & Torugsa, 2016)

Integrating employee retention strategies with sustainability strategies feels like the perfect divide-and-conquer opportunity for sustainability teams and HR. The sustainability team brings  bandwidth, headcount, budget and expert knowledge to the table and in doing so builds advocates for their cause throughout the business. HR benefits from leveraging the sustainability strategy to help employee retention whilst harnessing  potential opportunities around attracting better talent for less and increasing productivity, well being and engagement.

An example of how this could play out in practice is email – specifically ‘email fatigue’, which we all suffer from; the state of being overwhelmed by your inbox. A recent survey shows that email fatigue could lead 38% of people to quit their job. At a more general level, ‘there’s a negative impact on your well-being associated with what arrives in your inbox almost 24/7….It can lead to stress, anxiety, and burnout. Email fatigue can affect your productivity and overall quality of life.’ , which then makes it a HR issue.

But it is also a CSO issue. Why? There is a carbon impact and energy cost to each and every email sent, received and stored. This carbon impact multiplies based on the number of people included in an email, the number of devices the email is received on (e.g. desktop and phone) and any attachments. And, unless you empty your inbox (and your deleted box!) regularly, this energy impact remains, as the email is stored in multiple cloud systems forever, consuming energy.   This means email management is a significant issue for a CSO trying to cut their organisation’s carbon impact.

Digital waste employee engagement campaigns, such as those run by Tam at Halo by Design, involve raising awareness of the carbon impact of digital activities like email, and permanently reducing them. These campaigns get the support of HR as they provide a clear message to the whole organisation that reducing reliance on email is a good thing – for environmental reasons, and for employee wellbeing. A typical KPI set is a 15% – 20% decrease in email volume per person, tracked by the CSO on a month by month basis.

Email is not the only opportunity. Other examples where HR and CSO are aligned could include encouraging physical meetings vs video conference calls (especially when people are in the same office), car pooling, walk to work days or volunteer days for charities which align with the company’s sustainability targets.

Regardless of the initiative, it needs to involve a rethink of our preoccupation with organisational silos.  From our experience a HR / CSO collaboration can be mutually beneficial with the first step being for both teams to come together and work out where their KPIs align and then look for quick wins to test out how they can work together.  And, for now, it would seem that email is a good place to start!