Afnor has now released its latest working document on Human Governance which will be tabled for the plenary ISO meeting to be held in Australia in September. At this stage this is still primarily a basis for further discussion and it is likely to be some considerable time before any workable standard is produced.

It is a 19 page document but the meat is on page 4 when it asks in -

‘Section 1.2 Why are we concerned?’

In effect, this standard will cover three areas of interest, essential to corporate efficiency :

• Employees’ interests that would be better anticipated, served and taken into account (training, career development, competency improvement…)
• Economic interests, through a better measurement of human resources as immaterial (read as ‘non material’) assets
• Societal interests, as the human governance approach links to an essential axis developed within the ISO 26000 (social responsibility) norm’

and continues on page 9

“4. Scope of the future standard “HUMAN GOVERNANCE

This standard will address, inter alia :

• Establishment of a set of principles and behaviors to be followed and enforced
• Definitions of the terms commonly used when designing, presenting, reporting on the HR strategy, linked to the corporate overall strategy
• Practices, mechanisms supporting effective human governance approach.”

While its intentions should be of great interest to the HR community its suggestion in “6.3.3 – A basic tool : The annual corporate HR report” betrays a lack of ambition in terms of what it might report to the Board.  If a Human Governance standard is to be credible in the boardroom it will have to make a clearer statement of its value.