Global Standards for HR: Are We Missing Something?

Standards may be defined as a set of rules. Rules that determine how certain people would behave in certain situations. Rules and predictability go hand in hand and predict the behavior of individuals in given situations. They also act as a means of classifying people into categories- as those who follow certain standards and those who don’t.  Recently I read this piece on tlnt.com on approval by ISO to create Global HR Standards. This acceptance got me thinking on how feasible it will be for ISO or any other such body to create universally applicable standards for a domain as socially constructed as Human Resources (HR) and what it would mean for organizations adopting these standards.

Much like the Fair Trade standards governing the procurement of coffee or the fair labor practices standards, most standards are created by voluntary bodies and are free for adoption or rejection by the larger audience for which it has been designed.  Also, standards can be created by anyone and it’s the adoption of it that determines its success. In effect there could be numerous available standards whose success would be determined by the willingness of organizations to adopt them.

Unlike the organizational rules which are backed by a hierarchical authority to ensure their adoption, standards have to rely on other means of adoption.  A standardizing authority may use scientific evidence as a means to highlight how the standard created by it is backed by science and hence warrants an adoption. ANSI (American National Standards Institute) will be developing standards for global HR and how effective they will be in convincing organizations on the scientific validity of their measures beyond statistical correlations would be interesting to see.

Additionally, a standardizing agent may try and create an elite identity around the followers of its standards and thus encourage active membership.  Most organizations are forever attempting to differentiate themselves from their competitors in the hope of attracting the brightest and the best talent. While following a global standard and benchmarking of performance may please the analytical side but I have my reservations on the kind of usefulness that such global standards could offer in terms of actual improvements on the ground. Unless this is actually backed by active nurturing by corporates which would mean active sharing of best practices and in turn a perceived threat to the pursuit of uniqueness that I earlier referred to.

Furthermore, standardizers may actually involve certain organizations in the design stage and the power equations at the design stage could determine the final shape of the standards as and when they emerge. This could in effect mean standards would mirror the practices of a few, with the expectation of making them applicable for a larger audience. This could actually undermine the creativity in practices and may actually encourage firms to look more like the powerful elite who created the standard in the first place.

I am not against a globally accepted measure on the cost of hiring or the heads to account for while calculating it, but my point here is to highlight how in our effort to standardize we may be turning a blind eye to certain realities which could have a bearing on how our organizations may look like in future.  My two cents on this would be for organizations to assess their existing systems, account for their own realities, outline their future outlook and then determine the relevance of these standards in their own context. Our organizations are loaded with numbers and standards to follow and it may be wise to take an informed call before deciding to add to this long list of numbers we track.