The British Standards Institution (BSI) has announced that it has published a draft of the first standard for HR practice.
The ‘BS 76000 – Management system for valuing people in organisations’ has been developed with experts from a range of professional bodies including: ACAS, the CIPD and the TUC – in addition to a number of academics and employers.
The standards centre on the following basic principles:
- Senior leaders valuing their people
- The organisation operating in a fair and socially responsible manner
- Staff having rights “over and above” those enshrined in existing regulation
Open for public consultation until January 2015, the BSI is calling on HR professionals to provide their valuable input into the document.
Wilson Wong, Chair of the Human Capital Standards Committee at the BSI, explained how the organisation arrived at the decision to create the standards.
“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 the 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,” she noted.
Establishing a benchmark for continuous improvement
Set to be published in late spring or early summer 2015 the standard will act as a “requirement standard”, according to Hayes, giving HR organisations the opportunity to “check their own practice against these requirements to see what still needs addressing and ensure continuous improvement”.
The proposed standard can be viewed in full at www.bsigroup.com/bs76000 and is open for comments and suggestions.
CIPD makes call for HR standards
Earlier this month CIPD Chief Executive Peter Cheese revealed his support for a number of measures designed to professionalise the HR industry – including standards.
“I am determined to push hard on this whole debate about metrics and standards, we want to really build momentum for them in 2015,” Cheese told HR magazine on the last day of the CIPD’s annual conference.
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