Sustainable HRM Practices in Corporate Reporting

Shaped by the current turbulent era of macroeconomic forces, inclusive of the technological challenges of Industry 4.0, and ubiquitous uncertainties, the business environment and its stakeholders hold high expectations for sustainable organizational practices, including harmonized and comprehensible sustainability reporting. Increasingly, responsible behavior towards internal stakeholders comes from within organizations, valuing employees as a key asset and introducing sustainable human resource management (S-HRM) practices to motivate their workforce. Reporting on these S-HRM practices and sustainability is in the highest interests of managers and investors alike. Focusing on the involved parties, employees most particularly, the paper contributes to the stakeholder theory. The literature review, previous S-HRM studies’ interpretation and their critical assessment, the GRI standards’ comparative analysis, and Lawshe’s content validity approach have been applied as the methodological framework. With the purpose to extend the scientific literature on S-HRM and its reporting, the authors aim to close the gap between purely theoretical S-HRM treaties and more practically oriented studies on reporting. The findings on the key areas of S-HRM practices give rise to the S-HRM Practices Model, the main goal of this study. This comprehensible model may serve as a harmonized instrument for sustainable HRM reporting analysis and auditing for academia and practitioners alike.