Regenerative HR
Driving Sustainability Through People
We asked ourselves: How can PeopleEX use HR to support businesses to become more sustainable?
Enter our Regenerative HR service - working with organisations from the inside-out to restore and rebuild towards a more inclusive, just and sustainable way of doing things.
This would suit organisations who want to take action toward aligning sustainability to your people practices.
What is Regenerative HR?
Interested in becoming a sustainable business? We're using HR as a way to drive societal and environmental change.
All workplaces have a responsibility to help create a more sustainable and fairer world. HR can help drive this change within an organisation.
Regenerative HR uses HR principles and products to regenerate the systems in which an organisation already operates and beyond. It's about growing employees into empowered people inspired to serve an organisation's greater vision and work with a sustainable mindset. We do this by connecting to an organisation’s purpose and making links to day-to-day people activities that can support sustainability action.
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a helpful compass to assess and understand how we can do better.
The SDGs are 17 interconnected goals covering various topics such as climate change, gender equality and wellbeing. They are a global call for action to promote prosperity while protecting the planet. We have put the SDGs at the core of our Regenerative HR service.
Within the workplace, we believe that your people can be the force to propel an organisation forward towards meeting the SDGs. Inspired people equals an inspired organisation (not the other way around).
How We Can Help With Sustainability For Your Business
Regenerative HR is about making the SDGs tangible by embedding them into an organisation's people and culture. Using our HR and culture experience, along with the SDGs as a framework, here's a sample of where we can help.
Putting sustainability top of mind: We workshop with your people to source your organisational priority and impact areas, looking for the areas where we can make sustainability a vital part of your culture and mindset from the inside-out.
HR Policy: We help link HR policy and NZ employment laws to the SDGs. For example, to honour SDG 5 (Gender equality), we can help organisations formulate a pay equity approach, promise and commitment. We also work with clients to ensure connection points to the SDGs throughout the employment lifecycle.
Performance development: We are experienced in setting sustainability and wellbeing performance goals and KPIs where SDG effort is recognised and rewarded.
Position descriptions: We help organisations incorporate sustainability responsibility into position descriptions so all people in the workplace have an active role in meeting sustainability targets.
Capability framework: We work with organisations to design the core capability attributes which set in stone the expected behaviours and actions for a sustainability focus across your entire workforce.
Recruitment and onboarding: We help organisations test for values alignment and a sustainability focus through the recruitment stage and find inherent links in the onboarding process to where your business is making an impact.
Aligning with the SDGs - How We Do It
The SDGs encourage us all to take action. Within the workplace, we drive a behaviour-centred approach that helps our clients create positive change from the inside-out, encouraging their people to work, act and live more sustainably.
Our many years of HR experience have allowed us to understand where a sustainable and regenerative focus can be attached to the day-to-day people operations within an organisation. We’re excited to bring this understanding to our clients and help cultivate sustainable workplaces through our Regenerative HR service. People for Better is why we exist.
What Are We Doing At PeopleEX?
We are building to LAST. Introducing our LAST Strategy
We are a small business, and whilst our bread and butter (and love) is human resources, we also know that we have a role to play in operating with a more sustainable and regenerative focus.
Enter our LAST Strategy. Our Logical, Achievable, Sustainable and Targeted (LAST) strategy was designed by the people of PeopleEX and sets us on a course of positive action aligned with our purpose, size and within the context of our HR business.
We have put the SDGs at the core of this LAST Strategy, using the framework to guide our actions and intentions - both internally and for our clients.
Our Approach
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In 2022 PeopleEX joined the Sustainable Business Network as an Impact Investor to support our sustainability learning. Founded in 2002, the Sustainable Business Network is the largest organisation dedicated to sustainable business in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Our associate, Karen Meredith, has recently completed a certification in Business Sustainability Management through the University of Cambridge's Institute for Sustainability Leadership. Using her human resources background and this certification, Karen better understands the importance of leveraging an organisation's people to drive a sustainable and regenerative focus.
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As a team, we took the SDG’s and its 169 targets and reviewed them to look for the specific targets where PeopleEX could make a logical, achievable, sustainable and targeted (LAST) impact. Here are just a few. Full details can be found in our LAST strategy.
SDG 5 (Gender equality) – The UN states, ‘In 2019, women only held 28% of managerial positions worldwide’. We are proudly a female-led and run business (all working mums).
SDG 13 (Climate action) – We operate a flexible work-from-home model resulting in a lower carbon output (we estimate that we use 16.36 kg (CO2e)per $1k of revenue using the carbon assess calculator from Toitū). We communicate via video conference, but on the rare occasion we fly, we FlyNeurtral. Over the next 3 years, we aim to achieve nationally recognised certifications for our footprint. -
The 17th and final Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) is about partnerships, highlighting the need for cross-sector collaboration to achieve the SDGs by 2030.
SDG 17 aligns perfectly with why we exist – People for Better. We’re here to connect and work in partnership with your people to stimulate better business growth, better social and environmental outcomes, and better people and customer experiences. And, when required, we bring in business partners who are experts in their field to help us do just that.
Our current SDG partners include Velocite and IMPAC. Details about their service and our partnership can be found in our LAST Strategy.
"Sustainable development is the pathway to the future we want for all. It offers a framework to generate economic growth, achieve social justice, exercise environmental stewardship and strengthen governance."
— Ban Ki-moon, eighth Secretary-General of the United Nations
Book a free HR management consultation
To discuss your Regenerative HR needs, please get in touch. We’d love to talk to you about our approach and how it can help you.
We are based in Wellington, Auckland and Hamilton and travel or meet virtually across New Zealand to meet, connect and work with our clients.
