Ask most supply chain leaders what their sustainability strategy looks like, and you’ll hear a lot about tactical things like emissions targets, packaging commitments, and supplier standards. Rarely will you hear about the people doing the work. Yet investment in your people’s capability, mobility, and growth is one of the most consistently overlooked advantages available to supply chain leaders.
The gap between how leaders think about people and how they think about sustainability is not surprising. The two have traditionally lived in separate parts of the organization, measured by different teams against different metrics.
But that separation is becoming harder to justify. Supply chains are growing more complex, which means the capabilities required to run them are changing rapidly. The organizations that develop those capabilities internally will be the ones best positioned to adapt.
Why workforce development is a sustainability metric
At its core, sustainability is about building capacity for long-term value rather than consuming it. By that definition, a workforce that is being developed is more sustainable than one that is being depleted. High turnover and over-reliance on external hiring are forms of organizational waste. They're expensive, slow, and corrosive to the institutional knowledge that takes years to build.
Blue Yonder’s 2025 Supply Chain Compass research offers a revealing data point on this: only 5% of supply chain leaders cite investing in people as a top sustainability priority, placing it last on a list that includes implementing new technology, reducing waste, improving customer centricity, and a dozen other operational concerns. Leaders clearly value their people, but they haven’t yet connected workforce investment to sustainability outcomes in any measurable way.
That connection is worth making. The same research found that personal decision drivers, factors like organizational values, learning opportunities, and ethical alignment, now account for 25% of overall influence in B2B purchasing decisions, up from just 14% in 2021. In fact, in 2024, they overtook more traditional drivers like price and quality for the first time.
Are you upskilling your people or enabling?
Most organizations are better at equipping their teams than developing them. Enablement provides access to technology, platforms, and processes. But upskilling builds the understanding and judgment required to use those tools well, adapt when they change, and solve problems the tools were never designed to handle.
Supply chain teams need both, but the emphasis on enablement over upskilling has left many organizations with sophisticated systems but nobody on their teams skilled enough to use them well. That imbalance has a domino effect: technology investments underperform, teams revert to workarounds, and transformation initiatives stall midway through implementation.
Giving your teams the ability to interpret and interrogate data rather than simply receive it is increasingly foundational. And understanding how decisions in one part of the network affect outcomes elsewhere is essential in an environment where disruptions cascade quickly. The job has changed considerably, and the development investment needs to reflect that.
None of these capabilities can be bought off the shelf or installed through a software update. They require sustained investment in learning, structured development programs, and an organizational willingness to build from within. That's a meaningful commitment to both your business and to the people running it.
Internal mobility as a capability-building tool
The deliberate movement of people across roles, functions, and geographies is one of the most effective mechanisms for building supply chain capability. When people move across the organization, they develop contextual knowledge that outside specialists rarely acquire. They understand how procurement decisions affect manufacturing, how planning assumptions play out in logistics, how customer-facing teams experience the consequences of upstream choices.
Unilever has been particularly deliberate about building internal mobility into its talent strategy. Rather than treating movement across functions as a disruption to manage, the company has invested in tools that help employees identify lateral opportunities, map skills to new roles, and plan development paths that cross traditional function boundaries. The goal is to build the kind of cross-functional understanding that improves decision-making at every level, rather than deepening expertise in narrower and narrower lanes.
The sustainability argument for this approach is straightforward. External hiring is expensive and slow. It also depletes the organizational memory that walks out the door when experienced people leave. Organizations that develop and retain talent internally build capability over time rather than drawing it down, and they create the kind of institutional resilience that holds up when conditions change.
Putting people on the sustainability agenda
Supply chain leaders most likely to close the people-sustainability gap are the ones willing to measure it. That means tracking capability development over time: the rate at which people move into new roles, the skills being built versus bought, the depth of cross-functional knowledge across the organization.
It also means recognizing that the capabilities supply chains need now cannot be developed reactively. By the time a skills gap becomes visible in operational performance, it has usually been building for years. Getting ahead of it requires treating workforce development with the same rigor applied to any other long-cycle supply chain investment.
Organizations that get this right find that the returns extend well beyond workforce metrics. Teams with stronger capability use technology more effectively, adapt to disruption more quickly, and identify efficiency opportunities the organization would otherwise miss. Workforce development is, in this sense, an investment in the performance of everything else.
Sources
- Blue Yonder Supply Chain Compass: Spotlight on Sustainability (2024).
- Unilever workforce and internal mobility programs: Unilever/WIRED Workplace Report at their website (unilever.com)
