Global warming on the minds of executives. They may not actually care, but they realize that the growth of their business will partly depend on the sustainability of their products and the consciousness around environmental issues that the company can portray. So the question is this: where does HR technology fit in?
Transactional: This one is obvious. We need to automate more. There’s a lot of self service, but most of it is employee based. The amount of manager transactions happening out there is questionable. I’m pretty sure that managers are doing performance reviews and merit increases on-line, but simple things like vacation approvals might still be on paper. Then there are more complex issues like promotions and transfers that you never hear about managers executing.
Cultural: We’re doing a pretty good job at sending fewer paper communications. And after all, it’s much less expensive to push messaging out to the web. But cultural communications is not all we can do. We can do a much better job presenting an integrated face to employees and managers. How they see and operate in disparate systems really informs them about our ability to operate in an efficient manner.
Strategic: But what it all comes down to is figuring out how we can help the business be more sustainable through the future. What we actually need to be doing is facilitating green innovation in our employee base, helping them to think green. We need to be understating the competencies and interests that our employees have, and we need to figure out how to bring these employees together (social networks) and facilitate their innovative thinking around this area.
Sustainability is an interesting area for HR – normally thought as administrative overhead. But we can help, both by bringing efficiencies to our own internal processes as well as understanding how our talent innovates around sustainability and managing that talent well.
