Facts Over Fads: HR Decisions Grounded in Research
How to counter HR fads and make more effective people based interventions
In a previous blog, I had shared the story of golden apples. How shiny things can be distracting. I introduced a couple of methodologies that leaders and HR practitioners can use to maintain focus on the most effective solutions, in this blog I’ll expand on one of those- Evidence-Based HR (EBHR). Because if you’re not practising evidence-based HR, what type of HR are you practising (see below)?
(Source: Evidence-Based HR: A New Paradigm, CRF 2024)
A brief bio of Evidence-based HR
Evidence-based HR has its roots in evidence-based medicine, which rose to prominence in the 1990s. As the name suggests, evidence-based medicine emphasizes basing clinical decisions on scientific evidence from rigorous research studies. This was a reaction to medical practice that relied heavily on opinions, traditions, and the personal experiences of doctors when making diagnoses and choosing treatments.
The evidence-based concept soon spread to other fields, including management. In the late 1990s, management professor Denise Rousseau began advocating for evidence-based management. Like evidence-based medicine, the goal was for managers to incorporate findings from scientific research alongside their professional judgement when making decisions.
A few years later, Rob Briner extended this thinking to human resources management. He noted that many HR practices were not grounded in scientific evidence and argued the field should shift to an evidence-based approach. This meant basing people management decisions not just on fads, gurus, or untested ideas (those golden apples) but on the best available scientific evidence.
In 2000, Briner published a book chapter “Evidence-Based Practice: A Critical Appraisal-Evidence-Base HR Management” This outlined key principles of evidence-based HR, including:
- Basing decisions on the best available scientific evidence, not just opinions or conventional wisdom
- Using evidence from a range of disciplines like psychology and organizational behaviour
- Evaluating evidence critically instead of accepting claims at face value
- Translating evidence into organizational practice in a way that fits the specific context
Over the years, Briner and others have continued advancing evidence-based HR through research and advocating for its wider adoption. Professional groups like the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development have also promoted evidence-based principles.
While pockets of HR practice have become more evidence-based, there are still many areas using interventions not sufficiently backed by evidence. Proponents argue wider adoption would lead to more effective and ethical people management decisions. The growth of analytics and people data also supports the goals of evidence-based HR. However, changing entrenched mindsets remains an ongoing challenge!
What does Evidence-based HR Look Like in Practice?
In my work as a people geek, there is rarely a shortage of solutions, but a shortage of understanding the problem that needs solving. This goes beyond popular cultural statements pushed out by the popular management gurus on LinkedIn such as increasing engagement, reducing attrition or reducing bias. In business, there is an insatiable demand for problems to be fixed, but a finite resource available to fix them. This can be simplified into 3 central business questions-
What to fix, and by how much?
What method do we use to fix it?
For whom do we fix it for?
What is the most common question I find myself asking -
“what is the problem we are trying to solve? “
“If I had 60 minutes to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions”.
No good evidence Einstein said this
Think about just one of the people-related things you as a leader or HR practitioner are working on right now.
What is the problem you are looking to solve?..... Maybe it’s well-being.
First, what do you mean by well-being, is it engagement, psychological safety or is it mental health-related absence rates? Narrowing and defining the actual problem allows you to understand a) how reliably you can measure it and b) understand what you are trying to affect
Where would improving this most impact the business's performance? This might not be where there is the highest rate. Let’s take psychological safety. Improving psychological safety by 50% in a low innovation, low safety-critical environment might not be as beneficial as improving psychological safety by 5% in a highly innovative, highly safety-critical design environment.
How does our level of Psychological Safety compare within the organisation and between organisations?
To answer these questions, you can use the four sources of evidence to different degrees.
(Source: Evidence-Based HR: A New Paradigm, CRF 2024)
You also need to weigh up the trustworthiness and relevance. To understand this you can use these questions-
How was that evidence collected, or how biased is it? For instance, a manager asking their team if there is psychological safety is not the most trustworthy source of data.
What is this evidence telling you about your problem? Some amazing data on reasons for leaving might be adding as much noise as insights into your psychological safety problem.
Is it really the issue we should be focussing on?
After exploring the above, this is the first go or no go. If you can’t reliably define what you mean by well-being, you don’t know where best to have an effect, and you don’t know what are normal rates, then you are not ready to move onto the solution phase.
So, through exploring the problem by gathering evidence through the four sources. You can now define what you mean by well-being, you have a method of measuring it, you know where best to target it and you are confident it is a sufficient enough problem.
Coming back to those three central business problem questions- You know what to fix and by how much. You also know for whom it would be most beneficial. The next is the most effective method of satisfying that demand.
What can we do about it?
Let’s say, what you meant by well-being was psychological safety. You have identified a small team that is required to be highly innovative and have high safety critical thresholds to meet.
Revisiting those four sources of evidence, what is the range of solutions that might affect the psychological safety of that team? These might be stakeholder views- ideas from employees inside of the team, working adjacent to it, managers with higher psychologically safe teams. In addition, professional expertise- fellow HR practitioners, and consultants in the space who are external. Then evidence from inside of the organisation and finally also scientific or external evidence. The latter may seem like a minefield and complex. But with Google Scholar or even dare I say Bing Copilot, you can start to incorporate this.
Once you have collected this evidence it is time again to weigh its trustworthiness and relevance. For this bit, I am going to focus on the scientific literature area. Not all scientific literature is by itself is created equally.
The lowest form of trustworthiness in this area is internal case studies or white papers done by organisations with something to sell. These in some cases are nothing more than science washing. PR wrapped up in an infographic. This is not to say they are invalid, but that they should be treated accordingly with a healthy dose of scepticism. If this is all you have, then have someone in or outside your organisation who is comfortable analysing research scrutinise this for you.
The highest form of scientific literature is what are called published meta-studies. These are effective studies that pull all the research into one study, weigh and compare to indicate where the evidence is leading. As we might say, our best current knowledge of the problem space. Here is an example of one of these on psych safety below (Frazier et al., 2017).
What is this evidence telling you about the solutions in the problem space, what are going to be the most effective interventions? What might be the unintended consequences (there are always trade-offs)? For instance, improving Psych Safety may mean an initial increase in managerial resignations, some with critical expertise.
What are the constraints that the internal data and stakeholder conversations tell you about your environment? Between the most effective, and most realistic what might be a (not ‘the’) solution to test?
Finally, how are you going to measure the effectiveness and at what points are you going to measure? This comes back to the work you did in defining the problem, what specifically are you fixing, by how much and where?
Once you have all this, you are no doubt in a much more evidence informed position to try and tackle the problem. With clear measures and as importantly, exit points. When is enough enough.
Summary
Many people will recognise different bits of their existing approaches to work in the above. Evidence-based HR is as much a belief, and a set of values as it is a methodology. The execution of EBHR does not need to be perfect, but it should be proportional to the problem and the potential unintended consequences. As HR moves more into the mental health space, organisations are picking up more and more of what traditional medical practitioners would deliver. Failing fast or testing solutions with low evidence in this space is walking on a thin ethical line.
If you are interested in more around this space then check out the below links. Much of this blog is taken from the work of Rob Briner and his work on Evidence-Based HR.
https://www.cipd.org/uk/knowledge/guides/evidence-based-profession/
https://www.crforum.co.uk/hubs/evidence-based-hr/