OPINION: We cannot afford to sit on the sidelines anymore

 I remember the exact moment it hit me. I was sitting in a leadership meeting, listening to our facilities manager walk through the month's utility figures, when a question surfaced in my own mind — one I had never thought to ask before. Not "how do we cut costs?" but "what role can HR play in why we consume what we do?" In that moment, I realised that a piece of the puzzle had been missing from my own professional lens.

The person best placed to fill that gap was sitting right there. It was me.

That moment changed how I see my role. For years, I had defined HR in the conventional sense — recruitment, payroll, compliance, employee welfare. Important work, all of it. Sustainability sat comfortably in a shared space: the CSR team, senior executives, cross-functional committees.

What I had not fully appreciated was the unique lever that HR specifically holds — the ability to shape how every single person in the organisation thinks, behaves, and chooses. That is a realisation I wish I had come to sooner, and one I suspect many HR practitioners across Kenya are still in the process of making.

"What I had not fully appreciated was the unique lever that HR holds — the ability to shape how every single person in the organisation thinks, behaves, and chooses."

HR IS WHERE CULTURE IS MADE — AND CULTURE IS EVERYTHING

Let me be direct: HR sits at the single most powerful intersection in any organisation — the point where people meet policy. We decide who comes in, how they are shaped, what behaviours are rewarded, and what values are lived rather than merely laminated onto a wall plaque. If you want to change an organisation's relationship with the environment, you do not start with an energy audit. You start with culture. And culture is my business.

I have spent the better part of my career building cultures — teams that collaborate, leaders that inspire, workplaces that people actually want to show up to. Sustainability, I have come to understand, is not a separate agenda to be managed in parallel. It is culture. It is the sum of thousands of daily choices made by real people: whether to print that email or read it on screen, whether to take the lift or the stairs, whether to raise a hand when the office generator runs all weekend for no reason.

Changing those choices, at scale and with permanence, is a fundamentally human challenge. Which means it is, fundamentally, an HR challenge.

THE CANDIDATES ARE ALREADY ASKING — ARE WE READY TO ANSWER?

Something has shifted in the interviews I conduct. The young professionals sitting across from me are no longer satisfied with the standard tour of employee benefits and career progression frameworks. Somewhere between the opening pleasantries and the salary discussion, they pause and ask: what is this organisation actually doing about climate change? It used to catch me off guard. Now I come prepared.

This is not a niche preference held by a handful of idealistic graduates. Global data, and my own lived experience at Radio Africa Group, confirms that a significant and growing portion of today's workforce — especially millennials and Generation Z — will factor a company's environmental commitment into their decision about whether to join, stay, or leave. We are competing for talent in a market where our sustainability story is part of our pitch, whether we have written it deliberately or not.

I have started rewriting our job descriptions to lead with what we stand for, not just what we need. Our onboarding now includes a frank briefing on our environmental commitments and the specific ways each role contributes to them. It is a small change on paper, but I have seen it make a meaningful difference in who applies, who accepts our offers, and — perhaps most importantly — who stays.

TRAINING IS WHERE SUSTAINABILITY COMES ALIVE

I have sat through enough corporate sustainability sessions to know what does not work: a forty-five-minute lecture from a consultant, a certificate of completion, and then back to business as usual by Thursday. What works — what I have seen work — is contextual, personal, and sustained.

When I began weaving environmental content into our training programmes, I made a deliberate choice: I would never present sustainability as an abstract global problem. I would always bring it home. What does this mean for how we run meetings? For how we travel for work? For how we handle our suppliers? When the people in the room can see themselves in the story, something shifts. The awareness stops being information and starts being conviction.

We ran a departmental sustainability challenge last year — low-budget, internally designed, a little rough around the edges. The team that reduced their paper usage the most won a modest prize. What surprised me was not the winner. It was the conversations the challenge sparked: colleagues debating better approaches, managers asking for systemic changes to reduce reliance on printing, someone from accounts proposing a fully digital approvals workflow that we subsequently adopted company-wide. From a simple challenge, a movement.

"When people can see themselves in the sustainability story, awareness stops being information and starts being conviction."

YES, THERE IS A BUSINESS CASE — AND I HAVE MADE IT

I understand the questions that come from the finance side of any leadership table. Sustainability initiatives need to demonstrate value — and they should. I do not shy away from that accountability. I welcome it, because I have found that when you do the work, the numbers hold up.

The office's shift to a digital-first workflow — something I pushed for and project-managed through HR — delivered measurable savings in printing and procurement costs within the first quarter. Energy awareness campaigns that we embedded into our quarterly staff briefings contributed to a reduction in after-hours electricity consumption. These are not anecdotes. They are line items that I present to leadership, because sustainability that cannot be measured will eventually be de-funded.

Beyond direct savings, the reputational returns are real. Our clients notice. Our partners ask about our practices during due diligence conversations. The organisations that will thrive in the next decade are not just the most profitable — they are the most trusted. HR is where that trust is built, one hire, one policy, one training session at a time.

And with Kenya's environmental regulatory environment tightening — and international pressure on corporates intensifying through frameworks aligned with the Paris Agreement — compliance is no longer optional. HR that embeds sustainability into governance, procurement, and conduct frameworks is HR that protects the organisation from avoidable legal and reputational risk.

WHAT I HAVE LEARNT: START SMALL, STAY CONSISTENT, CELEBRATE LOUDLY

I want to be honest with fellow HR practitioners who are at the beginning of this journey: it is not always smooth. There will be initiatives that need refinement, timelines that shift, and moments where the enthusiasm of the planning room does not quite translate to the office floor. I have had my share of those moments. They are not failures — they are the process. Each one taught me something that made the next initiative sharper.

What I have learnt is this: the organisations that succeed at embedding sustainability are not the ones with the most ambitious targets. They are the ones with the most consistent habits. Start with something visible and winnable. Share your progress openly — the successes and the setbacks both. Recognise the individuals and teams who lead by example. Make sustainability feel like something that belongs to everyone, not a project imposed from above.

If you are an HR leader reading this and wondering where to start: start this week. Audit your job descriptions. Review your onboarding pack. Ask your facilities team what the single biggest source of waste in your office is and design a human-behaviour intervention around it. Find the colleagues who are already passionate and give them a platform. You do not need a budget line or a board resolution to begin.

THE PLANET IS WAITING — AND SO IS THE NEXT GENERATION OF TALENT

I think about the graduates who will walk into Kenyan workplaces over the next decade. They will have grown up with climate change not as a distant geopolitical concern but as a lived reality — erratic rains, rising food prices, water scarcity. They will ask harder questions than the ones I face today. They will make choices — about employers, about loyalty, about effort — based on whether the organisations they join are part of the problem or part of the solution.

As HR professionals, we are the ones who will decide what world those graduates enter. We are the ones who write the policies, shape the cultures, and hold the organisations we serve to account. That is not a small responsibility. It is an enormous privilege.

I am ready to use it. I hope you are too.

To learn more about CHRPK Jemima Ngode, click here to subscribe to her YouTube channel, Acing life with Jemmie