The human side of sustainability: Workforce matters

When it comes to sustainability, the emphasis tends to be on environment and governance, with a softer lens on people practices, but there’s growing global awareness of the enormous value of human capital and on finding ways to enhance workplace wellbeing to encourage and promote “people sustainability”. 

At Kyocera, we support the notion of people sustainability through our philosophy of asking ourselves “What is the right thing to do as a human being?” This philosophy is based on the idea that the most fundamental morals and ethics of our humanity should guide our decisions and actions in daily life. 

Part of this is continually looking for ways to make our workplace more sustainable. This Harvard Business Review article titled “Sustainability is about your workforce, too’ provides some practical ideas on how to achieve this:

1. Understand that people sustainability extends past the parameters of HR, by ignoring global citizen mandates such as employee safety, diversity and inclusion, and fair pay companies open themselves up to reputational damage that can impact the bottom line. 
2. Embrace people sustainability as part of your business strategy and include it as an integral part of the corporate structure and governance. 
3. Take a broad, long-term vision of people sustainability and find innovative ways to incorporate it into the company culture.
4. Create a roadmap around people sustainability and adopt a systemic approach that aligns goals, metrics, incentives, processes, and culture around sustainability.

We like to believe that Kyocera, with our enduring philosophy ~ doing what is right as a human being ~ keeps us focused on the importance of human capital and the need to protect the workforce.  

This continues to serve us well and we are aware that people sustainability requires a nuanced and organic approach, that will continue to evolve and grow. 

I believe that by working together we can play a substantial role in improving the well-being of humanity and the planet. 

Michelle Frenzel - HR Manager - KYOCERA Document Solutions South Africa