Global corporate world is experiencing a shift in paradigm today, from a conventional financial structure to a modern-capacity based economy exploring green economic aspects of business. Green Human Resource Management (GHRM) is a principal strategy in business where the HR department is adopting a number of environmental management techniques depicting the significance of going green at the workplace. With increased ecological awareness, the corporate world determinedly conforms to play a vital role as a solution to environmental hazards. The objective is – why not changing our lifestyles that adversely affect the environment today rather than facing turbulent and unruly consequences in future?
Green HRM is defined as the use of HRM policies, philosophies and practices to encourage sustainable business resources to promote environmentalism by mitigating an untoward harm to the environment. Its goal is to create a green workforce by bringing an awareness among employees about the complexities of environmental management for them to understand and acknowledge green culture in the organization.
The Green Objectives of GHRM
- Green Recruitment: It is the process of recruiting talents with knowledge, skills and behaviour that comply with the organization’s environmental management system. It is assured that the new entrants must adhere to the environmental culture of the organization and are able to maintain its environmental value. For eg., employers can include green job descriptions, eco-friendly locations, and paperless interviews etc.
- Green Performance Management: It defines issues based on environmental concerns, policies and responsibilities of the organization e.g. organizations can deal with performance management issues by installation of corporate-wide environmental performance standards as well as green information audits to fetch data on environmental performance.
- Green Training and Development: It is the process of educating and training employees to induce environmental awareness to redevelop working methods with the purpose of conservation of energy and reducing waste e.g. employees can be trained to educate customers about the benefits of becoming eco-friendly and purchasing green products.
- Green Compensation: It is the process of giving rewards and compensation to employees for achieving environmental goals of the organization to motivate them e.g. managers can encourage employees to bring some green ideas to implement in their jobs which can later be used as one of the objectives to achieve in the organization by mutual decisions and hence, the employee can earn incentives as reward.
- Green Employee Relations: It involves employee participation in green initiatives of the organization to enhance the chances of better green management e.g. to broaden the scope of employer-employee relation, a suggestion scheme can be initiated wherein all employees from top to bottom level in the hierarchy will be required to contribute to the scheme.
- Green Initiatives for HR: It is the alignment of green HR practices into the system as part of corporate social responsibility with the help of human resources e.g. HR executives can guide line-managers and create a network of problem-solvers to implement environmental policies by entire team cooperation.
- Green Building: It is the workplace to minimize the exploitation of natural resources which are greatly used in their construction. Green buildings also include enhanced features like renewable energy, energy efficiency and storm water management e.g. tweaking the temperature of the office to set thermostat, using efficient energy-saving lighting systems, replacing desktops by laptops as they consume less energy would be a few steps to build earth-friendly workplace.
Paperless Office: In paperless workplace, the use of paper is restricted by encouraging automated workflow which cuts down the consumption of paper and the cost of paper related actions such as copying, printing etc. e.g. centralizing document storage and taking notes on whiteboards or tablet devices can cut down paper use by more than 20%.
