This month the British Standards Institution (BSI) published the first ever draft HR standard. The standard, with the catchy name BS 76000 – Management system for valuing people in organisations – Requirements and guidance for use, is now open for public consultation until January 2015. The BSI is calling for HR professionals to have their say.
The draft standard has been developed by experts from professional bodies including Acas, the CIPD and the TUC, as well as a range of employers and academics. The standard’s basic principles include senior leaders valuing their people, the organisation operating in a fair and socially responsible manner, and staff having rights “over and above” those enshrined in existing regulation.
Wilson Wong, chair of the human capital standards committee at the BSI, says the decision was made to start with a high level principles standard. “We came to that because we felt that without a values-driven culture, it would not be possible to use the best and develop the potential of all the people contributing to an organisation’s value chain,” he explains.
“There is a growing industry recognition that HR needs a consistent set of standards to ensure good practice,” adds Anne Hayes, head of market development for governance and risk at BSI. “The experts recognised that an overarching management system standard would help organisations to assess what they already have in place and address any gaps.”
However, Paul Kearns, chair of the Maturity Institute (which is developing its own set of management standards) and former chair of the BSI’s human capital standards committee, feels that the standard doesn’t go far enough. “It doesn’t tell people what or how to measure,” he says, pointing out that the standard tasks organisations themselves with measuring success, rather than measuring companies against a set of specific criteria. “If the company is allowed to choose what it measures, there’s no acid test,” he argues. “It’s not objective or meaningful.”
But according to Wong, the very point is that the standard does not prescribe the ‘how’. “An organisation should be the best judge of what adds value across their people systems,” he says.
Jim Newell, the group HR director at the BSI, agrees. “The management system must create a framework that promotes best practice without trying to fit every possibility,” he says. “[The standard] provides a structure to build interdependent and sustainable plans for investment in people.”
Whatever their view on the standard itself, most experts agree that BS 76000 may be controversial as HR has not yet been subject to the standardisation experienced by most professions. “The professionalisation journey of HR will involve standards of some kind,” says Wong.
“We could stick to process standardisation or we could recognise the issue of professional judgement and discretion with the corollary of accountability.”
And despite not being on board with the direction the draft standard is taking, Kearns is in favour of standards as a concept. “We need standards more than we ever have done,” he says. “Anything that pushes standards up the agenda is positive.”
The finished standard is likely to be published in late spring or early summer 2015. It will be a “requirements standard”, explains Hayes, which means “organisations will be able to check their own practice against these requirements to see what still needs addressing and ensure continuous improvement”.
Now it’s time for the HR community to have its say. “Without input from the people who a standard will affect, there is a danger that BS 76000 will not achieve its intentions because key issues are not addressed or dealt with in a way that organisations feel is appropriate,” warns Hayes.
To read the proposed standard in full and make comments and suggestions for improvement, visit www.bsigroup.com/bs76000.
