During Sicily’s summer heatwave, Floridia’s famouse snails were baked alive in their shells when temperatures reached an alarming ~120 Fahrenheit (49 Celsius).

Wildfires have been blazing elsewhere in Italy, as well as in France, Greece, Australia, California – can anyone remember when there wasn’t a relentless, uncontrollable wildfire somewhere?

2021 was also the year it rained on a Greenland ice cap for the first time and Canada’s last arctic shelf collapsed.

Meanwhile, July 29, 2021 was declared Earth Overshoot Day, meaning the world’s population had already consumed more that year than the planet could regenerate.

(For the record, the US and Canada hit their overshoot day on March 14, while the UK managed to last until May 19. Pat yourselves on the back, folks.)

What does this have to do with HR management? Isn’t green branding more of a marketing problem? Or operations? Or any other department but HR?

Actually, no.

The fact is: No company can go green without employee buy-in. Don’t get me wrong – leadership has to be all-in, too, but if your people aren’t on board with your green initiatives and policies, they’re going to fail and fail hard.

Which is where HR comes in.

In this Process Street post, I’m going to lay out 9 fairly simple best practices that you and your team should be doing if you want to ensure that your pro-environmental behaviors (PEBs) succeed.

• The business of going green
• Best practices to boost your GHRM yield
• Reaping the rewards of GHRM

Let’s get to work!
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We’re all doing our part to be more eco-friendly, but let’s not beat around the bush: At the end of the day, even saving the environment needs to have an ROI. The primary function of a business is to generate revenue, after all; if your company doesn’t have revenue, your Green initiatives are kind of a moot point.

Corporate sustainability is not a new idea. While the term “greenwashing” didn’t come into use until the ’80s, and “business sustainability” until John Elkington’s 1994 paper for California Management Review, the concept behind both dates all the way back to the ’60s and Westinghouse’s “clean and safe” nuclear power plants.

It’s been around a while, in other words, so let’s look at some recent numbers.

85% of S&P 500 index file regular sustainability reports. Over 80% of investors factor ESG (environment, social, and governance) data into their decision-making. At the start of 2016, $22.89 trillion in assets (26% of all managed assets) were the result of sustainable investments – a nearly 5% increase since 2012. By 2020, sustainable assets under management $35.3 trillion (36% of managed assets).

“Going Green” isn’t just about paperless memos and reduced carbon footprints, though. It’s only through the commitment, performance, and efforts of your employees that you can effectively adopt environmentally aware practices. This requires a complete shift in your business’s values and cultures – a shift that is only possible if backed by your employees.

For your employees to adopt pro-environmental behaviors (PEB), you need to have established human resource practices that encourage them. You need, in other words, to “Green” your HR management, or as it has been creatively termed, Green HR management (GHRM).

As I’ll show you in this Process Street post, not only does GHRM create more environmentally aware employees, but environmentally aware employees are more engaged at work and have higher job satisfaction.

Here’s the rundown:

• What GHRM can do for you
• Walk the talk: Promoting Green values within your company
• Ability: Green branding, not Greenwashing
• Motivation: Recommend, reward, recognize
• Opportunity: Sustaining a culture that thrives

Let’s get started!
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