It is now 12 months since the International Organisation for Standardisation published its standards for human resource management (ISO 30408) and recruitment (ISO 30405). They were certainly a long time coming and now they are here it would be interesting to know what kind of impact they have made on HR departments, particularly in multinational enterprises.
In many companies what the authors call “human governance” is perhaps already undertaken within the sort of framework proposed by the standards – although reading the standards out of context is a pretty self-evident, dry and tedious experience. But then it should be remembered that what are being described are “standards” and, as such, must be applicable to a wide variety of organisations. In fact the very need for an HR function is in part because people are not generally very well handled by line managers and the job of HR is to establish and impose good benchmarks for the company to follow.
The new standards could then be a useful point of authority for HR to enlist when meeting its accountabilities. Many other departments will also be familiar with ISO standards covering their fields of operation. These standards are also not alone, as a raft of other HR-related standards have been published or are in the pipeline. Those already published cover assessment service delivery (10667), HR vocabulary (30400), and sustainable employability management for organizations (30406), cost-per-hire (30407) and workforce planning (30409). Others yet to appear include an “impact of hire metric” (30410), quality of hire (30411), retention (30412), a turnover metric (30413), Human capital reporting for internal and external stakeholders (30414), diversity and inclusion (30415), workforce management (30416) and many more.
Given the sheer volume of ISO standards that are scheduled in the next few years it is important to establish an internal review mechanism so that your company can stay ahead of the game. It should also not be overlooked that FedEE itself also provides two comprehensive codes of practice for multinational companies – covering a suggest global framework for employee terms and conditions and also compliance with the forthcoming GDPR in Europe.