Canadian HR Reporter

CANADIAN HR REPORTER October 31, 2016 NEWS 9 CHECK-UP on your Workplace Health Find out how your employee wellness program stacks up, discover new ways to improve it or learn how to get started. It's easy! It's free! It takes 5 minutes. Visit our website and take the Workplace Check. It's a fact, a healthy workplace is good for business. one, said Greenhalgh, adding that, so far, about 12 countries have signed up for his working group. "What we need to then do is work with countries that have the competency framework and work with those that don't and come to some agreement. So although we're using our model as a foun- dation going forward, that will evolve in time, I'm sure, both to reflect what other countries need and also to reflect the evolution of the profession itself because it's a multi-year project. So what HR will look like in three years, I imagine, there will be some sig- nificant differences to the way it is today." Typically, they'll start with a couple of different capability models and look at best practices, said Carlyle. "ere'll be research that gets done, and then through this struc- tured process, a coming to a stan- dard, and they'll start to get global input. And we'll find new things — I can guarantee you there'll be some place in the world that's doing something differently that people will go, 'Wow, that's re- ally neat.' And it's a way to come to best practice and standardize around best practice." e working group will try to get as close to unanimity as pos- sible, he said. "ey're really looking for no sustained, substantive disagree- ment, so eventually you've got to let go of the little issues, and get to some agreement… and within a year or two, you can actually get to an agreement about 'Here is a global standard.'" In the past few years, through ISO's HR committee, a number of standards have been devel- oped around workforce planning, recruitment and corporate gover- nance, said Carlyle. Benefits of standards Any standard helps establish a baseline or a benchmark for what- ever issue is at stake, said Vuicic. "Whether that's performance, whether that's sustainability, whether that's something for the environment, it really depends what the objective is… so, in this case, it would help set that inter- national benchmark for the HR profession." e standard is voluntary un- less it becomes legislated or it be- comes a norm or expectation in an industry, she said. "en it becomes almost a re- quirement for doing business or operating," said Vuicic. "Establishing an international benchmark for a profession is a positive direction and anything that helps to streamline require- ments and expectations and clar- ify those expectations both on a national level and international level just helps level the playing field for any players in the indus- try and ensures clarity for expec- tations in that industry for anyone operating in that field." Since many companies now operate on an international level, "the marketplace is really global and understanding what the re- quirements are on a global play- ing field can help, whether it's in a bottling or packaging industry or as an HR professional. Just clarify- ing what the expectations are can help both in the front end in terms of helping someone do business as well as clarifying uncertainties or disputes when dealing with differ- ent markets." e intent of that type of stan- dardization is to have best practice available globally, said Carlyle, and to have a commonality for people working internationally. "You have these global stan- dards that you can rely on when you're trying to work in other countries, with other organiza- tions, whether its companies, government entities or whatever." It provides a baseline, said Carlyle. "If you wanted to implement workforce planning or you want- ed to have a better measurement process around certain HR func- tions or whatever standard is developed, you literally can get these off the shelf and know that you could implement it and you would actually be pretty close to best in class. And you would know that if anybody is doing the same process elsewhere else in the world, you'd have pretty good comparables. So if you're trying to partner with a company or you have a supplier and… for corpo- rate responsibility, you wanted to audit their hiring practices, if they were ISO-compliant with the hir- ing standard, you'd have some as- surance," he said. "It also gives you a best practice that you can go get. With the ca- pabilities in particular around HR, I would expect there'll be some type of mapping to the ISO stan- dard so that a Canadian certifica- tion will then have an equivalence in Australia, the U.S. or elsewhere. And there'll be better portability of… our credentials." is is probably one of the most significant things that has hap- pened in the human resources profession for some time, said Greenhalgh. "It is a young profession, it's de- veloped at different rates and in different ways in different coun- tries and this is the first step in bringing it altogether as a genuine profession. ere's a multiplicity of benefits that stem from that, not least of which is mutual rec- ognition of designations around the world, which is very handy, particularly as we live in a global village." ISO < pg. 3 HR standards provide baseline, best practice "It would help set an international benchmark for HR."

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