HR Standards

Talent2, in conjunction with Australia’s Bond University, has been charged with the development and delivery of national HR practice standards. The Queensland University of Technology has received Australian Government funding to form the project.

The objective of this project is to develop a consistent set of National Advisory Standards for the professional practice of Human Resources (HR) in Australian universities. The Standards will also be used for international comparative benchmarking purposes. Standards set the basis for quality assessment, performance examination and for demonstrating to stakeholders that value for money is being achieved. Twenty-one Australian universities (The Universities’ HR Benchmarking Group) support this project and are willing participants and contributors.

Currently there are no national standards for the professional practice of human resource activities in Australian universities. Thus each university independently establishes the standards that it ‘ could expect to see ’. The Universities’ HR Benchmarking Group identified a number of HR measures and metrics relevant to the university sector and these will be used to inform the research base in establishing standards. For example, the ratio of academic to non academic staff has a wide range of results across the sector but benchmarking can identify the mean, median and shape of the results. From this we can estimate “what we could expect to see” and, importantly, variances can be justified on the basis of institutional diversity.

Similarly, with human resource standards we can establish “what we could expect to see” in relation to individual universities by reference to the national advisory standards but also treat each university separately by understanding the reasons for adopting different standards. To have each university independently establish human resource standards would be manifestly inefficient (priority differences, time frame differences, format differences and common language would present obvious issues).

The intent of this project is to develop a consistent set of standards to address these issues.

In scope areas include:

• Learning and Development
• Remuneration, Benefits and Recognition
• Workforce Planning
• Attraction and Selection
• Performance Management