By the end of this decade, global luxury car giant BMW plans to be the world’s most sustainable automotive industry player. In this regard, the company aims to cut its carbon footprint by a third and also look up to the goal of becoming a ‘Climate-Neutral’ organisation.
While many organisations talk about sustainability in this era, experts feel that it can only be achieved by making sustainability every employee’s responsibility. An article in Harvard Business Review talks about the same.
The article highlights that companies around the world that have been able to win the sustainability game have made it a point to imbibe ownership in all their stakeholders, especially the employees. When all are on the same page, things get pretty smooth in terms of achieving a common goal.
Ilka Horstmeier, Member of the Board of Management and Human Resources & Labour Relations Director at BMW, confirms the same thought while speaking to ETAuto. She says that although the luxury car major is on its path to delivering the greenest electric car by 2025, there’s a lot more that needs to be done beyond making electric cars.
Horstmeier says, “At the organisational level, we are promoting sustainability as a way of life. Our employees are motivated to build sustainable cars.”
She also mentions that individual mobility remains the top priority for the company and BMW is working heavily on this aspect in order to achieve its goal of sustainability.
As already mentioned earlier, organisational sustainability can only be achieved if sustainability is made routine. Therefore, imbibing it into the office culture accelerates the whole process of ownership.
Let’s take an example of Marks and Spencer, a retail giant founded in 1884. The company introduced an initiative wherein its employees were paired with jobless people. It was a small initiative wherein the employees would help these people in skill development and confidence building.
This initiative was initially launched on a small scale. It has now gained a lot of popularity where more and more people want to be a part of it. This happened because the company transferred a part of ownership towards sustainability to its employees as well. Later, an M&S employee also founded “Buddy Network” to help the colleagues.
Horstmeier did agree to the concept of imbibing ownership.
She recalls that two years ago, a young lady, who happens to be an employee of BMW, built a floor mat of recycled and recyclable materials. Now, it is going to be used in 3.4 million cars.
This year one of the engineers and designers cooperated on an idea to come with a substitute for leather in the Mini (BMW model). Horstmeier says, “This is the mindset we need. If people come to BMW to make a change in sustainable mobility then I would be very happy as an HR.”
She also states that at BMW, the employees push the company towards sustainability and young people want to work with BMW because they can work on solutions.
In order to promote sustainability as a way of life, BMW also launched a ‘Sustainable innovation challenge’ wherein the employees are sent to “One Young World,” which is a global forum for young leaders. The automotive industry giant is in a collaboration with the platform in order to be a part of the change initiative.
Talking about the future plans of the company in terms of work, Horstmeier says she is buoyant with the virtual and hybrid mode of working. She says everything will be individualised which means there will be no one size fits all approach in the coming months.
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