HR Essay (Essay Sample)

Introduction
It is quite healthy for a business to embrace sustainable practices which ensures that there's a guaranteed clean environment as well as healthy and happy employees. Sustainability and going green is good for the business and gradual transition and improvement of policies will help mitigate waste and enhance the efficiency of your business. Below are few scenarios that require an explanation on how jobs/employment will change in Canada over the next 10 to 15 years as we:
Shift to a low-carbon economy
The transition towards a greener economy in Canada will extend beyond the creation of new green jobs. The labor market will feel the impact related to the use of renewable energy. The low carbon economy will trigger overall job growth, which will run in tandem with new risks. There will be an increase in energy efficiency programs that will mainly revolve around maintaining, producing, installing equipment, manufacturing, electric vehicle industry expansion, and construction employment. However, a huge challenge lies ahead as the labor market and skill policies need to develop an effective strategy that should benefit the workers and create a fair system of sharing the adjustment costs.
Become more environmentally sustainable as defined by triple bottom line (TBL).
The recent trend has seen many companies embrace the triple bottom line, a concept that prioritizes people, both the employees and communities. The concept is not profit-driven, and it aims at helping various companies see value in Mother Nature and take up the responsibility of protecting the environment. Being more environmentally sustainable will imply that the companies in Canada track their impact on the environment and come up with an approach to work sustainably so that the plant does not suffer at the cost of running their businesses. Adopting a green approach will open up many employment opportunities for the working target group, contrary to the concerns that going green is bad for business. The concept will see the enhanced longevity of more companies since corporate sustainability measures the ability of your business to operate indefinitely. Employees will have a guarantee that they could work safely under healthy conditions, which enhances productivity. There is also a possibility that the companies will employ more people who will help run the initiative.
Shift to greater automation
Embracing greater automation implies that people will have to acquire new sets of skills to avoid becoming obsolete. The workforce will need to improve on some skills such as social, technological, and emotional skills as the demand for other skills falls, such as physical and manual skills. Over the next 10-15 years, shifting to greater automation will transform the workplace since they will increase interaction with even smarter devices and machines. Adopting automation will have numerous benefits to the business since it will enjoy higher productivity, improved corporate performance, GDP growth, and new prosperity. However, the companies will have to train their employees or employ employees conversant with new skill sets.
Below are HR practices that an organization can use to become successful and attract a pool of talent through sustainability, automation and going green.
The twenty-first century has been keen to highlight environmental concerns globally. The sudden interest is a result of the emerging treaties in a bid to help combat climate change. The prolonged exposure and harmful consequence of industrial pollution, toxic chemicals, and waste materials have triggered the government and other regulatory bodies to develop stringent policies and regulations to help curb and mitigate unhealthy environmental practices (Ahmad, 2015).
Companies are not left behind, and most of them see the need to endorse strategic Green HRM. HR professionals are now slowly understating that encouraging employees to be environmentally friendly is the way to go in this modern society. Any effort directed towards making the world a better place is highly encouraged, simple gestures such as making double-sided photocopies, using energy-efficient bulbs, and making powering down computers after a few minutes of inactivity. It depicts top environmentally responsible practices that are the initial stages of Green HR.
It's not new to find companies implementing EMS (Environmental Management System), a strategic tool that gives a company a competitive edge. It helps a firm to get better control of the adverse impacts. The system comprises planning, commitment, implementation, policy, measurement and evaluation, review, and improvement of HR systems that align with the organization's goals and culture.
An effective and functional HR organization needs to find techniques and strategies to deal with the ecological footprint instead of paying too much attention to the economic issues. Nowadays, organizations have to concentrate on social and environmental factors with the same urgency they exhibit when dealing with financial and economic factors. However, an organization needs a strong figure and team player to facilitate sustainable corporate strategies. The sustainability issue is becoming critical since we see leaders in the corporate world emerge to create awareness of the issues. Most practitioners in the HR environment are tasked with spreading awareness and implementing the set policies.
Organizations implementing the Green HRM techniques are reporting improvements such as increased consumer/ customer confidence, increased workforce productivity, improved employee morale, stronger public image, a position as an employer of choice, employee retention, efficiency, motivation, employee loyalty, and brand recognition. The Green HRM initiatives form a larger portion of corporate social responsibility (Martínez et al., 2017). The initiative consists of two elements which include the preservation of knowledge capital and environment-friendly HR practices. In any organization, human resources alongside their systems form the basic foundation of a business. They have an important role in planning and implementing eco-friendly policies. It would be a hard task for a company to accomplish this task without human resources.
Human Resources dockets play an important role since they significantly impact the way the policies are implemented and accepted to develop an environmentally sustainable approach. The HR teams are dedicated to make corporate environmental sustainability work. Below are ways in which a company can become successful by adopting green and sustainable HR practices and behaviors:
Coming up with policies that are positively related to employee and intended green role behavior. It implies that Human Resources teams that embrace the company's green values and policies will cause a similar ripple effect on how the employees think and behave. Organizations where the HR lacks seriousness in implementing their corporate environmental sustainability also portray low environmental concern and action levels by correlating perfectly with employees to promote extra-role green behavior. It implies that employees tend to increase the propensity to practice green behaviors that are beyond the job description. This only happens in organizations where the HR department is active in promoting green thinking and performing their environmental behaviors and actions as part o