Review: SHRM Standards Development

Standards are: “Documented agreements containing technical specifications or other precise criteria to be uses (sic) consistently as rules, guidelines, or definitions of characteristics, to ensure that materials, products, products, processes, and services are fit for their purpose.” – International Standards Organization, FAQ

Okay, this is not going to be as dry as that start, I promise.

Just over a year ago, SHRM announced its initiative to develop HR Standards. At that time, Lee Webster, the West Point grad in charge of the project at SHRM, noted the following objectives:

• Setting the agenda on what the standards are for HR organizational success within the profession.
• Elevating the view of HR practitioners as a vital, learned group of business professionals.
• Overseeing the [HR] standards across the globe

” Once these standards are created, local HR leaders can use them to manage their practices more effectively in their workplaces, and [the standards] will be connected to what we do with certification,” Webster said. “Having operating standards rather than using an ad hoc approach to manage HR operations will allow HR to act in a manner similar to other professionals. It can lead to SHRM becoming “the arbiter of HR standards not only for the domestic U.S. marketplace but also across the globe. Those standards can cover a range of topics.It’s really only limited by what the profession says is necessary or not necessary to be a standard. The resulting document can be a few pages to an entire manual.”

It’s an interesting initiative and we’ve been treating it like any other product demo. You may recall that Gerry Crispin is deeply involved in this process. The discussion about HR Standards and the need for them is already very global in scope. There is an academic initiative in Australia, a commercial initiative in the Pan Asian world (remember Neil McCormick?), InformImpact has published a formal set of about 2,500 standards used by its members (the Metrics Standard). There is a Canadian Initiative as well.

Of course, there’s little attempt to dodge competitive wheel reinvention. (And it’s extremely interesting to note the importance of Australia in the global standards development process with three of the six initiatives)

In the domestic American marketplace, there are roughly, 7,000,000 firms that have some form of HR process (payroll is the foundation of HR), 50,000 vendors who deliver services to those 7,000,000 firms and roughly 1,000,000 HR professionals (depending on how you define the term). The single largest problem faced by SHRM’s initiative is developing credibility and relevance in the market.

A search on “hr standards” getting involved shows Australia’s Talent2 (Neil’s organization) as the primary link. There are no obvious mentions of the SHRM program.

Currently, there are only 156 places on the net that even mention the initiative. 86 of those are SEO stubs pointing to Gerry’s article on the subject. The remainder are the result of a single press release announcing the initiative. It appears that ‘getting the word out’ isn’t really a part of the current game.

The great challenges in the establishment of industry standards are:

• Figuring out how to get anyone to care in the first place
• Organizing a credible public process
• Coming to Agreement on whether a standard is useful
• Coming to an Agreement on the standard
• Figuring out how to get anyone other than the people who created the standard to care.

The SHRM initiative runs significant risk because it is not well promoted. When asked, the project principals all had high hopes for adoption of the standards, once crafted. None seemed to have any idea how that might be accomplished. “Maybe the government will adopt them as standards,” said one. With barely 30% of all HR professionals represented, SHRM will have to aggressively reach beyond its boundaries to have serious traction.

It’s easy to dismiss this endeavor. HR has a number of particularly regional characteristics. It’s different between industries. The legal framework is an international maze. Who is on which side of the organizational fence is getting murkier as HROutsouricing and Recruitment Process Outsourcing take firm root. And, those definitions vary by country and region. The problems are big and the potential for dismal outcome is high.

That said, we are moving into a time of increasing measurement. Every aspect of everything will be measured, scored, assessed and processed. The intra-organizational definition problems (getting all divisions on the same page in the songbook) are as large or larger than the inter-organizitional issues (comparing apples to apples results between companies for best practices reasons). The emerging demand for silo specific metrics and analytics will drive the creation and adoption of standards whether or not there is a centralized body doing so.

I spoke with Lee Webster at some length last week. He is an amazingly smart, soft spoken, insightful and patiently determined fellow. As SHRM’s point man for the standards initiative, , he is able to deliver the story smoothly (even though I must have been the 10,000th person to ask). He is both proud of the effort to date and open to the idea that he may deliver the narrowest of victories.

One pont he made really caught my attention. “With standards, you allow organizations to focus on the places where they can really differentiate. In other words, standards define the minimum necessary for performance. Rather than wasting resources trying to emulate best practice across the board, the use of standards suggest that some arenas are worth no more than the bare minimum.”

In other words, standards offer a performance floor. Noting that everything does not have to be the pinnacle of achievement is a welcome addition of commonsense.

The great thing about Lee Webster is that he views the SHRM Standards Development process as an opportunity for everyone involved to learn. He shrugs away critique about the utility of standards by saying, roughly, “this process will be good at determining whether or not the industry wants a standard. If it doesn’t we may end up with a small body of product.”

After all is said and done, the SHRM standards initiative is a good thing. If you’re interested in tracking down Lee to get involved, you can reach him at SHRM.