Eco-design of products and services: how can business teams and HR work together?

We often talk about eco-design as an engineering or R&D topic. That makes sense: that’s where choices are made about materials, design, processes, packaging, repairability. But in real corporate life, eco-design rarely fails because of a lack of technical ideas. It fails more often because of a lack of alignment: unclear objectives, inconsistent trade-offs, insufficient skills, and above all… a way of organizing work that doesn’t allow people to do things differently.

That’s where cooperation between business teams and HR becomes a decisive lever. Because eco-design isn’t just a method. It’s a transformation of roles, skills, and routines. And those topics are precisely HR territory.

The real obstacle: eco-design competes with short-term performance reflexes

In many organizations, long-established reflexes are powerful: cutting costs, meeting deadlines, ramping up quickly, minimizing the risk of quality issues. Eco-design adds a new constraint: considering environmental impact across the entire life cycle. As long as this constraint remains peripheral, it gets crushed in trade-offs. The project moves forward… then returns to “classic” design at the first cost, sourcing, or schedule problem.

HR’s first role here is not to “raise awareness.” It is to help the organization make these trade-offs explicit and consistent. When decision criteria change, objectives, governance, and evaluation methods must change too. Otherwise, teams are asked to do better… while still being assessed as before.

A simple form of cooperation: linking skills, decisions, and recognition

In practice, cooperation means setting up three bridges.

The first bridge is skills. Business teams need practical tools: simplified life cycle assessment, material choices, packaging, recyclability, repairability, digital sobriety for services, substance management, customer requirements, and sometimes product regulations. HR can turn these needs into realistic learning paths: a shared foundation (understanding impacts), then role-specific modules, then internal experts able to coach others. When this path doesn’t exist, eco-design depends on a few motivated individuals… and never scales.

The second bridge is decision-making. If you want eco-design to survive pressure, you must embed it in the rituals where decisions are made: design reviews, project milestone reviews, investment committees, purchasing trade-offs. HR can help formalize simple “expectations”: which environmental criteria must be discussed at each milestone? what level of evidence is required? who is accountable? Once these questions are built into governance, eco-design stops being a “nice-to-have” and becomes a standard.

The third bridge is recognition. This point is often underestimated: if a team spends time designing more sustainably but is penalized against deadline, cost, or volume targets, the signal sent is destructive. HR can help adjust objectives and evaluation criteria—not by adding complexity, but by explicitly recognizing impact-reduction efforts, risk control, and the quality of trade-offs.

The winning duo: “business + HR” to secure scaling up

When you want to make eco-design operational, there is a key moment: moving from pilot to rollout. That’s often where everything becomes fragile. Teams have built a more sustainable prototype… but production says it’s complicated, purchasing says the supply chain isn’t stable, quality is concerned, sales fears a change the customer might notice. That’s normal. Eco-design affects the entire value chain.

In this phase, HR/business cooperation makes it possible to deliver three very concrete actions: organize a structured feedback process, capture learnings (what works, what doesn’t), and integrate those learnings into standards and training. Without this capitalization, each project starts from scratch, and eco-design remains a collection of isolated initiatives.

Conclusion

Eco-design isn’t just another “technical” topic. It’s a change in how decisions are made and how work gets done. Business teams bring the technical solution; HR brings the ability to make it sustainable: skills, governance, recognition, routines. When these two worlds work together, eco-design becomes a collective capability—not a fragile initiative.