Page 24 - Enterprise Engagement and ISO Standards eBook

Enterprise Engagement and ISO Standards

ISO 10018: Standard Guidelines That Embrace Engagement

ISO 10018:2012 “provides guidance on engaging people in an organization's quality
management system, and on enhancing their involvement and competence within it.”

Because ISO 10018 standards were created with a similar purpose of the Enterprise
Engagement Alliance framework and implementation process but by organizations with no
connection to one another, it’s interesting to compare the work, as the similarities are
surprising.

The Enterprise Engagement Alliance was founded in 2008, specifically with the purpose of
creating a formal framework and guidelines for the implementation of engagement
practices across the enterprise. By collaborating with dozens of experts in different areas of
engagement, including representatives from the corporate, solution-provider and academic
words, the EEA endeavored to produce a formal framework and implementation process
and standardization of nomenclature, as there is in almost any successful field.

The EEA produced its first framework and implementation process in 2009. Separately, in
2012 and with no apparent knowledge of the EEA’s work, the Technical Advisory Group for
ISO 9001 standards developed Quality Management Principles, and subsequent optional
standards and guidelines that embrace engagement. The ISO’s “Quality Management –
Guidelines on People Involvement and Competence,” also known as ISO 10018, provides the
nearest published ISO standard to the proposed ISO engagement standard.

While ISO 10018 largely speaks to the importance of workforce planning as it relates to
quality management, the comparison is interesting, specifically because the frameworks
were developed by two different groups filling in gaps for a similar purpose with no
knowledge of one another’s activities. That they came to very similar conclusions, even
down to the nomenclature, helps further validate the work.

ISO engagement standards and the EEA framework differ in several respects from other
approaches to engagement:

• Engagement is connected to specific organizational results, i.e., quality management
or, in the case of the EEA framework, also sales, customer loyalty, distribution
partner engagement, customer service, safety, wellness, productivity, etc. Employee
experience is a critical component of, but not the only factor involved with,
connecting employee activities to performance.

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