Sustainability

Ghost Writer touches on the periphery of Marti's much-loathed carbon footprint topic discussing sustainability in an HR Leader and Manager context.

So if you haven't been sleeping under a rock, you've heard seemingly endless stream of messages regarding sustainability - the broad term meaning, "How are we going to do this forever without harming the environment?"
However, I think something very big, massive, huge, and overwhelmingly large (dare I say ginormous?) missing from the dialog is sustainability of humans in the workforce. This is the next big thing on two fronts for HR Managers and Leaders.
On front one, this is about the question, "How do we keep enough people employed to buy whatever we're selling?" To protect people, and make more money by avoiding safety issues, many companies automate jobs, and as a fixer of broken stuff, I have no problem with this. We assume people will find work in less strenuous environs or learn to program these robots, but in reality, that means less lucrative service jobs. However, as the self-serve checkout line has shown, even those jobs aren't beyond automation.
On front two, there's the dwindling supply of hard-working knowledge laborers running these ships. No administrative assistants. Slow computers eating valuable minutes. Inefficient, yet necessary for our primitive human selves, travel for face-to-face "show me" follow-up and meetings. Increasingly large responsibilities assigned to an ever-decreasing pool of people with the assumption we will "work smarter" (hate that saying, BTW) or "prioritize" those tasks. Prioritize: secret code word for mindful neglect, strategic procrastination, or in a best case, benign neglect of stuff that should get done (but ain't gonna get done, because I like sleep, but Marti doesn't need it cuz she lives on coffee).
These are the next big questions for HR Management and Leadership. How do we leave people in the process so there is real money circulating to buy things? Secondly, for those in the few jobs left, how do we make those jobs humane? Because, I can tell you, Marti's 16-18 hour days are inhumane, even though she survives them. My Tums habit isn't altogether sustainable either.
Then again, I pull a page from economics class. Will supply and demand take care of this for us? Is our current, unsustainable human resources malaise just a function of shifts in supply and demand that haven't settled into a new normal?