HR ISO 30414 Certification An In-Depth Chat With David Simmonds’s
Raja Sengupta
Based out of UK, David is one of the best known global entities in HR Analytics. David has worked in many large organizations in telecoms in finance, and health across six continents. He is also a visiting professor and a renowned academic researcher in HR.
David is one of the first consultants to be qualified an auditor license for HR ISO 30414 certification. His simple, objective oriented view on ISO 30414 certification process, HR analytics and evidence based HR shine through in our conversation in which he offers in-depth information about the certification process
About Raja Sengupta:
Based out of Bangalore India. Raja heads the HR analytic s and reporting function for SE Greater India Zone while at the same time collaborating and contributing internationally across multiple global HR bodies within SE. He has been in the Data Science industry for about 19 years and has a diverse combination of data reporting, HR research, HR perspective planning simulation, analytic s and CI . He has been a specialist in the HR analytic s field for the last seven or eight years, spanning across HR tech startups in Europe and large corporates.
Raja :
Hi David, good afternoon Its a pleasure connecting and getting an opportunity to discuss about the HR ISO 30414 certification/ QA and HR Data science
I’m with the Schneider Electric currently and head the HR analytic s and reporting function in Greater India Zone while also collaborating and contributing internationally across global HR bodies within SE. I am not in a position to divulge more information about my professional mandate in SE but I’ve been in the industry for about 19 years now and have a diverse combination data reporting, research, perspective planning simulation, analytic s and CI within HR. I’ve been a specialist in the HR analytic s field for the last about seven or eight years spanning across HR tech startups and corporates. I am aware of the initiatives of ISO in HR function specific certifications and keen to know more.
David:
Thank you Raja My background is, is similar from the perspective, I’ve been in HR all my life. I’ve worked in many large organizations in telecoms in finance, and health. I’ve also been an HR consultant, I’ve worked on six continents. And I’ve also worked in universities, I’m professor, ping managers at the Masters level, get qualifications, and get membership of professional institutions. I’ve only been interested where of HR analytic s for about five years. Because, as you know, stereo-typically, people in HR don’t do numbers. They don’t do analytic s. They use gut instinct and bias and experience. Typically, they don’t talk about graphs and charts and numbers and spreadsheets.
Raja:
So what is your overall perception about the relevance of data science in HR?
David:
I became interested in data science for HR because I think this is an area of growth, I think it’s an area that will impact HR. It’s something could transform the profession. I think it’s something that would enable HR to step up and take its rightful place in the boardroom. Many people been working in HR do transactional aspects in terms of hiring and firing and promoting and maternity benefits and those kinds of things. Whereas, in fact, I think what HR analytics can do is to move transactional to the transformational, and so we can give HR, the data, the evidence, the numbers, the graphs, the charts, to be able to speak the same language as those in the C suite in the boardroom. And HR can take its place as a strategic partner in organizational transformation.
Raja:
What is your understanding and specific experience with regards to implementing the new ISO standards for operational HR?
David:
About two years ago I became aware of a whole new international standard for operational HR being drafted by ISO. On 15th of January 2019, I logged on to the ISO website at nine o’clock in the morning, I was the first person in work to pay my money, and I downloaded the new standard. And this is going to track completely transform every organization, every HR function throughout the world. Because at last, and for the first time, we can measure the return on investment of HR, we can measure the ROI of the HR function.
Raja:
What is your perception on the volume of the HR standards and compliance market and what is the scope of its application within HR?
David:
This is huge, I think the market is massive, both in the public, private and the voluntary sector. Because they’re within the ISO. HR been doing its core function for many, many years, all the normal things about learning and development, succession planning, recruitment, mobility, turnover, health and safety, diversity, all the normal things. But we provide 60 metrics, that we can now establish benchmarks and thresholds. And we can track it over time. And for the first time HR can have an integrated reporting framework to prove what they’re doing. And they can then I will, I won’t be telling HR what to do they know what to do. What I can do is provide them with the ammunition, the evidence, the data, to go to the board and say, Please, can we have some resource? Or please can we have some opportunity to tweak it here to change it? And so that we can prove change over time? That’s what I’m doing.
Raja:
Excellent point. I could latch on to one common buzz word across HR board rooms ROI. I feel ROI is critical for the HR function not only to evolve but even sustain as status quo setup. This is being increasingly questioned by businesses, however at the same time demonstrable HR ROI remains somewhat elusive. How does the ISO certification tackle ROI expectation?
Also As far as the ISO standards for HR is concerned, you focus on the specific standard 30414, which is focused on the metrics part, right, the KPI part, but there are a concept of different standards. I think the idea-frication of HR specific stands evolved within ISO in 2018 or early 2019, I am aware that there five or six different ISO standards for HR. So I like to ask you, what is it? What are you exclusively focusing on. Also, what is the perception with the early adopters of HR ISO standards and what is the typical lifespan of an implementation and typical bottlenecks?
David:
As you would be aware the international standards organization in Geneva, Switzerland, is not allowed to market their own products. They normally leave it to the individual standards Institute’s of different countries. So in the UK, we have the British Standards Institute, they should be marketing this but they’re not. In America. It’s the American National Standards Institute. They’re not marketing it, so its region specific. So we’re doing SM we are using a number of different marketing channels to get it out there. networks, frameworks, conferences, webinar and as a natural transition people are gradually becoming aware of this.
We’re focusing just on ISO 30414. Because that’s taking all our time and all our attention, because it’s new. And what we’re finding however, you asked about actions, when we are talking to people in HR, or chipping decks, they say, we’ve not heard this standard, what’s it about? And, and who are you and and it’s all new. We told them that this is about we’re not here to be examiners or inspectors or policeman, we’re here to help the function and develop a mature and we empower them, because the internal and the external stakeholders will all benefit. You mentioned bottom line, and ROI and KPIs. There’s a lot of low hanging fruit there, quick wins some early successes. And when HR is enabled and empowered to do what he does best of all, it immediately impacts the KR A’s are the KPIs of every organization going forward
Every organization will have to adjust and amend or change in some way. And so whether it’s mergers and acquisition, rich buyouts, or diversification or downsizing or offshoring, or new markets or new products
Every organization is going to have to change and change will be found in technology and people. And what this ISO standard does is bring technology and people together in the HR function in-terms of interoperability.
We can now use analytics to impact the bottom line very quickly. And there are some quick wins, this isn’t going to take months and years, this will happen. In the first four to six months, they’ll be impacting the bottom line, whether it’s big, private or voluntary sector.
Raja:
Interesting David. Could we have a little more detail about the certification process itself, does it usually necessitate any system redesign or process redesign? Are there any dependencies or certain systems or vendors where the KPIs need to be computed from or some specific data dependency? Also is the ISO 30414 certification process similar to the certification process of other ISO’s
David:
We would approach an organization and we sign the contract with them. And that would involve finding out who the customer is. That is usually not just the HR director, but it would include a QA officer, and probably the chief finance officer, maybe the head of it as well. We get buy in and commitment to this new project. The first things we do is to look at the current systems and processes and protocols and portfolio, we’d look at their plans and priorities. We’re not there to tell them what to do there to help them change in the way that only they can know how to do it best.
We’d help the internal auditors get on board they know about audit, but they may not know about HR audit, or review. And so there’s an awareness raising project to be done straight away. And there may be some certification there of internal audits within the HR function.
Once people are on board as to how to test the data, the evidence, then we then go to the first audit and in the first audit, we would say, um, how good are you and can you prove it against these 11 core areas like leadership and stop turnover and recruitment and diversity and inclusion and so on. They would give us the data. They give us the reports. The auditor then takes that away and does a gap taking their evidence against the HR ISO standard.
That’s quite a big piece of work. And then the auditor goes back with a report and talk to the key players within HR and the key vice presidents or heads of department. Green. Good, Amber, not so good and then red. There could be years of non compliance or non conformance that you need to improve and the end user client would then say fair enough, we agree, now can you help us improve?
The auditor then says I’d like to, but I cannot. It has to be arm’s length, it has to be distant. Because otherwise, you’re in helping them to self-improve, they would be assessing their own homework. Our organization has a list of preferred suppliers. These are HR experts in different fields, or generalists or people with HR analytics expertise, or people with expertise in diversity, or whatever it happens to be.
That expert then works with the client for a month or two or three months, however long it takes to improve their reporting against the different metrics. At the right time, the auditor then returns and does a second audit.
And on this occasion, they close the gap between the evidence and the data and the standard. And at that point, they will be able to say yes, the organization is now up to ISO standard. And then they can certify them.
But we don’t just abandon the organization at that stage, because it’s a three year cycle of continuous improvement to be rectified and during that period, we monitor and evaluate and assess and help with light touch light touch monitoring for three years.
Raja:
That’s an in-depth insight into the process, however two key concerns here. Firstly during the auditing process itself, i.e when you get the reports from your client and scrutinize the existing processes, how do you audit that authenticity of the shared report itself? Secondly, what if the data systems and processes of the client are not evolved enough to even generate the kind of reports you need for the ISO auditing in the first place?
David :
Yes we are auditing the data, but we’re also auditing the processes and systems. Let me say at this stage, that we are in partnership with most of the large ACM platform vendors in the world, including SAP and Oracle, and CT, and workday, and so on. We’re also in touch with a large number of smaller organizations who are providing HCM platforms or HR systems.
And we’re finding that there is no, yet there is no one GM platform that actually meets the entire set standard, so what we do we get the evidence from the reports from the clients through whichever system they’re using. And then we give them feedback on which of the components they need and which they don’t. Now at that stage, we there are two ways we can help them get better data, better evidence, better reports from their systems, but we can also recommend additional platforms that would plug the gaps. the fact stands that there is no perfect system at the moment that does everything.
Raja:
Is the HR ISO auditing and certification process, compulsorily a centralized activity or can be a be a sequence of iterative or concurrent certification process for every subset of operational HR either by function or geographies, also how do you tackle the compliance and the confidentiality of the production data during the HR ISO audit?
David:
We typically enter then into a partnership agreement with a code of practice of ethics and professional conduct, which we sign and we insist that the end user client signs in terms of data, we do not drill down to individual level data, we use anonymized and aggregated data. So it’s at the departmental level. Rather than individual level, we know about the sense of information because it’s about people, and gender, and age. And we know about sensitivities of names, address and phone numbers and bank details. We don’t go there. That’s not for us to do, we don’t need that data, we would need aggregate to like, gender diversity
Whilst the standard applies to small and tight enterprises as well however, as soon as you get 1000 employees plus, and they may well be on different sites, different locations, either within one country or spread across several countries, or spread across different functions or divisions, we know this, but different organs, and organize themselves in HR differently. Some have a distributed network, some localized network etc. Once the organization is bigger than about two and a half thousand people, the HR would almost certainly be decentralized.
We, as an organization would prefer start with a pilot exercise, we would choose one business unit, encourage the client to assess review, audit the HR function in one area, and then to roll it out throughout the whole organization. And so we might start with Office headquarters and then see how it applies in in different in different areas in different divisions or different countries. So that’s how we would generally work.
Raja:
As I understand from your inputs, that the first activity within the certification process is the gap analysis. Obviously, there will be varying degrees of gaps in different organizations that you audit. So supposing on a specific audit you discover that the gap is on the higher side, so what kind of a specific advisory role you typically play in such a scenario?
David:
Okay, in addition to what I said earlier about the traffic lights report, where we get red, Amber green, and that is about conformity and compliance. There are major non conformities and minor non conformities and that’s the red would be major and the amber would be minor.
Let me elaborate by giving you an example. One of the core areas is on which one should I choose leadership. This is one of the core things which HR is connected with. Many organizations take this seriously. Within leadership, indeed, there are three metrics one time is very easy, and that’s called span of control. How many people does an average leader have reporting to them, so to determine the gap there, whether it’s whether the country is too wide or too narrow.
Another metric would be leadership development. So training programs has a leader been on in the last 12 months. How did they feel about it? How have they used it and applied it, and that’s a bit more difficult, but it can also be measured. So that’s leadership development. Again, there would be conformity or nonconformity. The third, true leadership in the standard is something called leadership trust. Now, many organizations do not assess, there is a standard way of measuring it is called the leadership trust index.
Most of the major platforms around the world do not assess this So we would almost expect there to be a red nonconformity against leadership trust. However, it might be added in some some organizations which are looking at things like 360 degree feedback, because the gap between 60 degree feedback and leadership trust is very small. And therefore the gap between what the organization is doing and the standard would also be very small.
So what we caught, major, minor, non conformities, we look at the size of the gap, and proposed the organization and then give advice about how to improve and then they’d work with an external consultant.
Raja:
I assume you’re referring to audit of aggregate data, take for example leadership performance index, typically only few leaders will have anomalies in terms of how they approach the issue of gender diversity, performance reviews , information flow within teams, even exhibit narcissistic tendency etc . That could be damaging however metrics on aggregated data will blunt out the effect of the few problem individuals, wont it?
Paradoxically a prescriptive plan will only be effective if process is aligned at the individual level. So that is a you know, a tricky issue where you do you ask for data on the individual level, if you feel that there’s a lot of anomaly or there’s a lot of disparity in you know, how different leaders have it may be aggregating to a conforming level KPI?
David:
Let’s assume that there is a problem with leadership. Let’s assume that for we would we would see that our role is to say, Are you reporting this? Are you reporting this consistently? Are you reporting this over time? And are you drilling down and diving deep into warehouses or different divisions or different districts or whatever? Are you doing it? And if you’re doing one, you then HR, what are you doing with that data in order to be able to identify individual problems and issues? Are you doing this? Can you prove you’re doing this? We still don’t need to see the individual records. At the at the most you may say okay, totally individuals may need to be sensitized. What exactly are your training program?
The triple bottom line, for example, increasingly, organizations are saying, yes, it is a profit. But profit alone is not sufficient, we also need to look at two other things. One is the environment, and one is the human capital. So its profit, and people and planet. And increasingly, organizations are wanting to look at all three of those that’s also been embraced by our colleagues in finance, who are looking at something called integrated reporting, where they’re looking at various types of different capital, such as intellectual capital and social capital and financial capital and human capital, as an input, these inputs would come into the organization, and the organization would add value, and that would lead to outcomes. And my specialism is looking at the added value in the human capital arena.
I was talking to a finance director said to me, David, this is fantastic. We’ve been waiting for this for years. I said, it’s not finance, it’s human capital. Yeah, because on the balance sheet on the profit and loss account, there’s a big black hole called human capital. But what the ISO standard does is to measure the value of the human capital contribution to the bottom line. And there’s a lot of low hanging fruit here. There’s a lot of early successes and quick wins. Because typically, during a project of getting the ISO certification, which would take about four to six months, we’re not waiting for months and years for this to pay off, it actually pays off, ROI is achieved during the project. And the chief executive would see marked improvements dramatically, very quickly.
Put that into another context. For example, in the United States of America, the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission is now demanding, it’s compulsory, it’s mandatory for organizations on the stock exchange in America to gloat publicly about their employees and their human capital. And they are therefore required now, quarter four, they are required to disclose externally, what may have been reporting on internally, to their investors or potential investors, whether those are institutions or individuals, they now have to have the data, the evidence, the information, in order to make it a level playing field. So let’s let me give you an example. Let’s say an organization has five vice presidents or heads of department, let’s say there are five seniors who are going to be retiring in the next five years, that information might now be held just internally, but shared externally, so that the investor or the potential investor can say, so what are you doing about succession planning? What are you doing about leadership development? How are you going to overcome that problem before it happens? So there are a number of drivers, not just the ISO, but organizations are looking at how they’re reporting on human capital
The core purpose of the audit to make it strategic and transformational.
Raja:
That’s a holistic overview David and overall corroborates with my own line of thinking in HR. Would like to slip in a concern about advanced analytics. You know, the machine learning and the predictive analytics part, which some businesses have been increasingly adopting for the past couple of years. What’s your view on its scope and your perception about compliance and standardization in advanced data science?
David:
Well, this is this is exactly where my organization is going. Increasingly, HR is adopting AI, learning. And they’re looking at the possibility of using that for predictive analytics. We looking at prescriptive analytics as the cutting edge here
Prescription isn’t only about insights. It’s about taking informed HR decisions based on existing trends for continuous improvement and process optimization
What we then do is to use the same data. And we use quite sophisticated statistical software and AI and we look at what’s going to happen next year. Not Tomorrow or three months, this time next year, and we can predict and prescribe to the organization what they should do. So we can predict in 12 months time, and then we can prescribe what they need to do about it for let me give some examples, um, get existing data, we can tell the organization this time next year, how many people have been promoted? Or how many people have left because they weren’t promoted? We can tell them how many people have been on which training programs and what they thought about it and how it’s been applied.
Raja:
All right, so that’s what I get. The context of your narrative is that this is some kind of an optimization modeling and a description that you’re giving for a mitigation plan for the future, based on studying the patterns in the past, isn’t it?
David:
Absolutely. And it’s not just HR patterns from the past within the organization. It’s using bench-marking data external to the organization. And that’s called Big.
So we use trend analysis, over time, the organization, but then we’re looking at industries and sectors outside the US, or even at the country or national or multinational level, to inform their decisions about what’s likely to happen in the future. in an another system, which can add or compliment to the systems they’re using. So as is very much a consultative consultation function to help the organization help themselves.
Raja:
All right, very interesting. But the fact is that optimization modeling and prescription seem very, very advanced aspects of reporting and analytics. So do you think most of the businesses are evolved enough to generate such insights from their existing systems or do they need to adopt or modify the current systems and processes?
David:
Yeah, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head, and you’ve answered it yourself. There aren’t very many mature organizations that can act for themselves. They would need the help of vendors and suppliers. We would not get involved in that. We would merely point them in the direction of those people who could help them. I wanted to emerging technology is not a part of ISO as yet
Raja:
Thanks, David. I think that answers most of the concerns. Thank you so much for this time
David:
Likewise Raja, let’s keep in touch. Absolutely. You take care bye