HR professionals have welcomed the increasing number of people measurement models in the market, following the launch of a global rating system for human capital management (HCM).
The VB-HR rating, developed by professional services firm Valuentis, comes in the same month that HR consultant Paul Kearns launched a similar HCM rating model, the Newbury Index Rating (NIR).
The Valuentis model, which gathers and rates data on 93 HR activities, has already been app-lied to organisations across 20 sectors, according to Valuentis chief executive Nick Higgins.
“It is designed to help companies justify investments in HCM projects,” he told Personnel Today. “It is based on eight years’ work in metrics, and the experience of 200 large-scale HR projects.”
VB-HR, which complies with the needs of the UK’s Operating and Financial Reviews and the Sarbanes-Oxley guidance in the US, looks at HCM in terms of effectiveness, maintenance and risk.
Duncan Brown, assistant director general at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Deve-lopment, welcomed the emergence of VB-HR, the NIR and other HCM models, including those from Penna and Saratoga.
“These methodologies have great value in forcing a more quantified and evidence-based approach to people management,” he said.
“However, I don’t think they will ever produce the holy grail of a single set of universal metrics, as people management is too diverse and difficult for that.”
Andrew Harley, group HR director at mobile operator O2, said the new models would help the overall HCM debate.
“People are waiting for standards and measures to develop,” he said. “Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is only now becoming mainstream and it still isn’t adopted by all FTSE-listed firms. The debate on CSR has progressed much further than HCM.”
