Sustainable HRM: A How-to-Guide

Abstract

There is a disconnect between the fields of human resources management (HRM) and sustainability. Historically, human resource managers focused strictly on maximizing the efficiency of people operations. Today, there is an opportunity—and a need—to leverage people strategy professionals to embed sustainability within their organizations while collaborating with diverse stakeholders beyond their organizations to advance both social and environmental sustainability. For this research, twenty-five people strategy professionals and eighteen sustainability professions were interviewed using a semistructured interview format of five key questions. Several themes emerged from these interviews which have been organized into a “Sustainable HRM How-to-Guide” for people strategy professionals who want to lead their organizations towards triple-bottom-line sustainability.