Work's Not Working... Let's Fix It!

It's Not the What, It's the Why. Steps to Evidence-Based HR: Rob Briner

• Sian Harrington • Episode 12

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In this episode, Siân Harrington speaks with Rob Briner about the challenges and benefits of adopting an evidence-based approach in HR. They discuss the focus on HR fads and the need to shift towards a more informed and effective HR practice. They explore the role of data and analytics in evidence-based HR and the mindset and skills required to implement this approach. They also highlight areas of HR that are poorly evidenced and discuss how taking an evidence-based approach can lead to more meaningful, healthy, inclusive and sustainable work.

 Key takeaways

·       Why HR fads are often ineffective and can be corrosive to the profession

·       How evidence-based HR involves looking at multiple sources of evidence, including data, personal experience, stakeholder input and scientific research

·       Challenges in implementing an evidence-based approach 

·       How data and analytics play a crucial role in evidence-based HR but it is important to consider the quality and relevance of the data

·       Areas of HR that are poorly evidenced include diversity and inclusion, employee engagement and leadership development

·       Some organisations are leading the field in evidence-based HR but there is still a need for more widespread adoption

·       Taking an evidence-based approach can help make work more meaningful, healthy, inclusive and sustainable by focusing on what is important and making better-informed decisions.

·       Three steps to help you start on the journey towards an evidence-based approach.

About Rob Briner

Rob is professor of organizational psychology at Queen Mary, University of London and associate research director at Corporate Research Forum (CRF). He is also currently a visiting professor of evidence-based HRM at Birkbeck (University of London) and professor at Oslo Nye Høyskole. He was previously co-founder and scientific director of the Center for Evidence-Based Management and has held positions at the Institute for Employment Studies, London School of Economics, King’s College (University of London), Bath University and University of Edinburgh. For more information on his recent work with the Corporate Research Forum on evidence-based HR please check out the Evidence-Based HR Knowledge Hub. 

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Rob Briner (00:00)
 
If you look at home and look in your kitchen cupboard, if you have one, you may find in that kitchen cupboard all kinds of equipment you bought, like a juicer, like maybe an egg poacher, like a blender, like a whatever, with intention this was going to revolutionise your life. But the fact is it was probably just a fad or a fashion at the time. And you saw that thing, it was exciting, you saw it was going to help you, you adopted it. And of course, sometimes some of us do use our juicer for more than two months but I'm guessing the vast majority of us stop and, after that time, and maybe 10% of people can't use their juicer. And if you think about this, all around the world, there are kitchens with cupboards in which have unused juicers in, for example. 

And I think HR fads are pretty much the same. It may be some of these new exciting things are effective. It may be some of these new exciting things do deal with the issues specific organizations have, but on the whole, they will not and they're a distraction and they say that's why I think they're corrosive to the profession. 

Introduction (00:00)

 Hey everyone, welcome to Work’s Not Working, a show about forward thinking people leaders, innovators and academics and how they think we can fix work to make it more meaningful, healthy, inclusive and sustainable. Brought to you by The People Space. 

I'm Siân Harrington and today I'm speaking to Rob Briner about the challenges and benefits of adopting an evidence-basedapproach in HR and why we need to move away from the what and focus more on the why. In other words, we are all doing too much stuff and we're not thinking enough about why we are doing it and the decision making process behind all our activities. 

HR now has access to more data than ever and is using it more, but this is not necessarily leading to greater insight and better informed decisions. Often other functions are some way ahead of HR in their use of data and analytics. Later on, we'll discover why an obsession with fads and the lack of an evidence-basedapproach overshadow the need for a more informed and effective HR practice. We'll delve into the role of data and analytics in evidence-basedHR and the mindset and skills required to implement this approach. And we'll highlight areas of HR that are poorly evidenced and look at what can be done to fix this. 

But first, let me tell you about Rob. Rob is Professor of Organisational Psychology at Queen Mary University of London and Associate Research Director at the Corporate Research Forum. He is also currently a visiting professor of evidence-basedHRM at Birkbeck University of London and Professor at Oslo Nye Høyskole. He was previously co -founder and scientific director of the Center for Evidence-basedManagement and has held positions at the Institute for Employment Studies, London School of Economics, King's College, Bath University and the University of Edinburgh. 

I first met Rob more than a decade ago when we ran a series of what was then seen as provocative articles on how HR was driven by fads rather than evidence and why this meant it was not delivering meaningful outcomes to organisations. So I begin our conversation by asking him all about this. 

Siân Harrington (03:20)

I think it's fair, Rob, to say that you're a bit Marmite in the world of HR. Yeah. And I know when you started off some 20 years ago or so, I think you were called the most hated person in HR by someone at the time. What led you to advocate for evidence-based HR? How did you get to this? Was there a moment in your academic career you felt was an area to explore? 

Rob Briner (03:43)

Yeah, there was. So when I was doing my PhD many years ago at a place called the Social Applied Psychology unit at Sheffield, apart from doing research into psychology and work, it had a master's programme. So I taught on it since my early days of doing my PhD as well. And I really enjoy teaching it and I enjoy working with the students. 

And I would often bump into them at events or conferences or in work meetings later. And I would say, so how's it going? I bet you're using all the evidence, the scientific evidence we taught you on the master's programme. And almost all of them say, no, we don't at all. And at first I was absolutely horrified about this and was saying, I guess initially I thought there's something wrong with them. So for years I thought something wrong with you. Why aren't you applying all the scientific evidence? It took me a while to latch onto it was me but I was like, it's not their fault. It comes back to the context they're working in, to the point about incentives, what they're awarded for, what do their customers and clients really want?

 So from that point, I guess I was also thinking about then turning back onto academics and saying, are academics very evidence-based in terms of the way they do research, in terms of the way they teach? And the answer is broadly, not particularly. So they're not particularly evidence-based either. In terms of the research they produce. So there's not just an issue about academics and practitioners, it's an issue for all practitioners and the way we practice. 

And a colleague at the time, Shirley Reynolds, who's actually a clinical psychology by background, she introduced me to this new concept in medicine called evidence-based medicine. And the idea is you take these multiple sources of evidence, so scientific evidence, which I was talking initially, but practitioner expertise in this context, the patient or the patient thinks and believes, and once you combine these to make more informed decision about what's the issue, what can we do about it? 

So this is perfect. This applies really well to organizational psychology. But then of course, if you move beyond that, organizational psychology normally works through HR. So again, I was getting organizational psychology practitioners saying to me, I'd like to be evidence-based but my clients don't really want it either. And then I thought, this is actually more fundamental, if you're interested in behaviour at work and improving organizational performance. it's not about these individual organizational psychologists. It's about the whole function. It's about the way HR fits in with that. 

So I then got interested in HR, much more in HR as a function, moving away a bit from organizational psychology and saying, what these people are doing is largely trying to shape employee behaviour. How are they doing it? Is it working? Is it effective? 

So I think asking a lot of questions about that, I guess possibly led to me being, yes, possibly the most hated man in HR or whatever. Because I think it's, again, in the context of people feeling they're trying to defend the profession, which you shouldn't defend the profession. Why should you defend the profession? It felt a bit threatening, like I was being very negative, but not everyone thought that. Some people thought what Rob is trying to do is help us get better at our work. And that is what I'm trying to do. 

No, I don't think I'm the most hated man in HR. Maybe I'm the most ignored man in HR now, not sure which, because evidence-based HR doesn't sound very faddy or exciting. It's not going to revolutionize your life overnight. Yeah, I think things have shifted a bit, partly because of the people analytics piece. And I think also shifted a bit because I think slowly in my perception, HR functions are realizing that challenging what they do, why they're doing it, linking what they're doing to a business decision starting there is not a thing you should get upset about. It's a thing you should be doing. So what I'm saying, I think possibly chimes a bit more with where the function, not because of me, where the function started moving anyway. 

Siân Harrington (07:28)

So Rob, you've pointed out that a major issue in HR is its focus on activities and the what, rather than the decision-making process. Can you elaborate on why you think this is an approach that's failing to make work better today?

Rob Briner (07:44)

If we think about the what and there's the old song, it's not what you do, it's the way that you do it. So I think HR functions and to be fair, not just HR functions are very obsessed with the what. That is, what is the thing we should be doing? And it could be a new policy, a new practice, it could be the latest thing, could be a fad, it could be just what's the programme we need to roll out here? The thing you do, the activity, the thing that often gets measured. 

So there's often very much a focus on that rather than the why. Why are we doing this? So it's not what you do that's so important, it's the way you go about deciding what the what is, if that makes sense. 

And the reason I think that is potentially quite harmful for organizations and HR functions is that you never take a step back and think why are we doing this stuff? What is important to the business? What is the opportunity or problem we're really trying to deal with? What you do is focus very much on a whole range of potential solutions and interventions and try and choose between them without really understanding what the issue is. 

And in a way, that's not surprising when you look at the way in which many professions, including mine, are rewarded. We're all rewarded for doing things, doing stuff, getting things done, ticking boxes, hitting targets, and not for the process by which we've decided what we're going to do and how we're going to decide to do that thing. One way I think about it, and this is a quote that's probably misattributed to Einstein. Allegedly he said something like, if you had an hour to save the world, he’d spend, everyone's heard this, he’d spend 55 minutes understanding the issue and five minutes thinking about what to do about it. I think in HR and other functions, that's reversed. So you spend a tiny amount of time thinking about what the issue or problem is or why we need to do something and a huge amount of time on the what. 

Siân Harrington (09:35)

And in HR, one of the ways we see this is, can I use the word obsession, with what we call fads, what's new, what's cool. And so how do you think that's playing out and how's that overshadowing the need for a more evidence-based approach?  

Rob Briner (09:51)
 
Yeah, I think without trying to sound too dramatic, I think in HR and other fields, to be fair, I think fads are fantastically corrosive. I think they are really damaging to the profession. What do I mean by that? I mean that people look at fads, the latest thing, cutting edge thing, to things that the cool kids are doing, the cool organizations are doing, and make all kinds of assumptions that if they, because it's new, because it's latest, because it's got a big name attached to it, a big company attached to it, if they do it, they will be successful too. 

And this again, takes people completely away from that process about say, what is our issue in this business, in this organization? What are our specific problems? What are we dealing with in our context? Fine. We've got a good grip of that. Now let's think about what might make a difference. What fads and fashions tend to do in any kind of area of life is redefine the problem we have, which is not really defined by a potential solution. And sometimes people call that solutioneering. 

Siân Harrington (10:56)

And I do remember, gosh, it must be about 12, 13 years ago when you did a presentation for me in one of my previous roles and we did the banana holder. You mentioned this plastic thing that holds bananas and I went, whoops, I've got one of those. So that was quite funny. 

Rob Briner (11:17)

I got one as well and had the same issue. I thought it was going to revolutionize my life. And it turns out I don't need to carry around bananas because I'm always near bananas. And also I've never had a problem with squash bananas. So why do I need this banana guard? 

And I think anyone in HR, particularly people who been around for a while will probably be familiar with the idea that they see a thing, they buy it, they will get a provider, they get it in and they're thinking, this is not doing anything and it quietly gets pushed away into HR's equivalent of the kitchen cupboard and not really used very much. So yeah, I think it's a human thing. 

Siân Harrington (11:48)

Yeah. Yeah. And so what is evidence-based HR? Let's explain that to people who may not have come across it and how does that help us to address these issues? 

Rob Briner (11:58)

I think evidence-based HR is in a way a horrible term, but we're stuck with it partly because it comes from evidence-based practice, which has been around in quite a lot of fields for at least 25, 30 years. And put simply, and it sounds so obvious and common sense, but the point is that we don't do it very much. But evidence-based practice simply means saying, what's the issue and what can we do about it? But in order to answer those two questions, you do three things. 

Firstly, you look for evidence across multiple sources. So in the case of HR, not just your organisational data, but you'd also look at your professional expertise. You talk to stakeholders and you look at scientific evidence. So you look across multiple sources to answer those two questions. 

The second thing you'd want to do is to think about the quality of that data or evidence. So again, wherever the data is from, sometimes evidence is really reliable, sometimes it's terrible. So there's no point in throwing in really unreliable or untrustworthy evidence into this mix of decision-making. You have to really be clear, this is the best quality, so let's pay attention to that. That's the second thing. 

The third thing is to take a structured approach. What do I mean by that? There's two things. The structure is first saying what is the issue and sticking with that and spending time on that. And only when that's fairly clear do you move on to the stage of saying what can we do about it. Structured in that sense, but also structured in the sense of being clear about the questions you're asking, taking structured approach to gathering the evidence, pulling it together, saying what have we got here? What do we think are the answers to our questions? So structure in that sense too.

And of course, the point is that everybody uses evidence. Everybody does all the time for everything, but that isn't what evidence-based practice means. And in a sense, it's taking what some of us sometimes do when we have to make a very important decision that's personally important to us, it's taking what we do anyway as humans, and if you like, formalizing that. So what we do as humans, I think what some of us do when it's really important, it may be getting a new job, it may be changing career, it may be moving city, it may be moving country, whatever. 

The personal decision is very important. We would tend to say, what is the thing we're trying to fix? What's the issue or opportunity that I don't have now where I am, for example, which might exist over there. What's the evidence or data that is an issue for me and is going to maybe be resolved by moving? I'm going to look at multiple sources. I'm not just going to talk to one person. I'm going to get other information. I'm going to think about the quality of it. And we're really trying to think about what is the problem of what you're trying to deal with and what should I do about it? And we do that quite carefully. We do it quite slowly and we'd be quite conscientious about the way we did it. So essentially it's taking that and trying to put it in the context of the workplace.

And one of the surprising things to me is that not just in HR, but even in quite senior management teams, is it's quite unusual for anyone in positions where they have to make a lot of decisions to have ever had any training in decision-making. Which is odd if you think about it. 

You think these are people who are paying quite a lot of money, we're putting right up there as our leaders, as decision makers, but it's almost like an amateur thing. You don't need training in this. You can't get any better at it. Just get in there, make decisions, you'll be okay. Which is a very, I think a very odd approach to what are very important decisions, which could affect individual employees, could affect the whole business, could affect the community, will affect your customers and clients, have all kinds of repercussions. But somehow we don't take it that seriously. We just assume we can just get on with it. So essentially that's what it is. What's the issue? What can we do about it following those three principles? 

Siân Harrington (15:30)

Okay. And obviously there's this issue then about the lack of training for leadership, for making decisions. What other challenges are organizations and HR in particular facing then when it comes to this? Because it's a subject we've talked about for a while now and few companies still seem, particularly in HR, to be adopting it. What's hard? What's the difficulty? What are you hearing from people? 

Rob Briner (15:54)

I think one of the things is, as already mentioned, is the incentives. So I think for an HR function, when I talk to them, often they are overwhelmed with stuff and fixing stuff and organizing stuff and harmonizing stuff to such an extent, they feel that evidence-based HR is, that's not my day job. My day job is tweaking stuff. And I get it because that's what we're incentivized to do. 

So if you have a sort of HR self -service portal and people keep complaining about that it's very hard to use, that drags your attention in HR away from what is the business trying to do? What does it want? So there's lots of sorting out, a lot of dealing with stuff. Again, partly because that's what you're being incentivized to do. So I think that's one thing that gets in the way.  

I think another thing is this historic, and it's still around, this whole issue of seat at the top table and is HR effective, is it making a difference? And that historical burden, I think, is still there in that what it sometimes leads to, I think, is the idea of doing lots of activity. The way of showing we are valuable is by saying, look at all our stuff. 

And one way I describe this is in terms of HR theatre. So it's the idea that you are doing things that look like you're making a difference because you're doing so much and no one can accuse you of not being busy. And indeed with HR, no one could ever accuse HR of not being super busy. But if you say, what are you trying to deal with? And is this stuff working? That's a completely different question. 

So the idea of HR theatre, actually, the idea of theatre first came after 911 with the kind of checks through airports and the idea of security theatre. The idea that a lot of the things we're asked to do is to go through security, there's lots and lots of stuff but is it really making a difference? So sometimes if we're unsure about if we can really help or make a difference, we tend to just do lots and lots of activity. So I think that's another issue is the HR theatre thing. And this kind of, say, this historic burden of you're not making a difference. 

And I think related to that, another challenge is that what this approach means, if you look across your practices and what you're doing, you may have to conclude, you know what, this thing we've been doing for five years this cost 400 ,000 quid or whatever it is, you know what? It's not working. We're going to stop it. And that requires a quite strong change in thinking. 

So part of our role is to go to the senior management team and say, that thing we did, it did not work. We are going to stop it. And that to me is still quite unusual in this profession. I know it happens, but again, any profession that wants to be evidence -based, stopping doing things is incredibly important and evaluating them as well. 

So I think the issue for HR, like some of the functions, is there's a whole set of factors that have come together to mean that when you introduce the idea of evidence-based practice, people go, great, makes sense, absolutely, I get it, I can do this, we can do this, maybe we need a bit of help, a bit of training, a bit of support, but we can do this. But the day job pushes them way, way away from that, along with this kind of legacy to be seen as valuable, but not really wanting to prove whether you're making a difference or not, but just to keep doing stuff.

So I think there's a whole range of things. And part of this may be, I think, a slight misapplication of Ulrich's HR business partner model. I think what that's meant is that sometimes HR functions see this as they are our customers. They, as in the business is our customer and we have to keep them happy. And again, that does not help you be an evidence-based practitioner. You're not there to make people happy. You're there to help the business. So if everyone likes you, that's great. But it doesn't help the business. 

So again, it's that issue of are you an order taker in HR, or are you actually trying to say, we want to know what the business is trying to do, and we want to help the business. We're not taking orders from anyone. We are helping the business. That's what we're doing, as every function should be. So again, there's this whole kind of complex set of factors. It's almost like a wicked problem. All these things that come together to mean although people get it and they feel it would make a difference, it's pretty hard to do.

Siân Harrington (20:10)

Yeah, that's interesting. It touches on so many different points. We all suffer from that sunk cost fallacy of not wanting to walk away from things that we've invested time as well as money into. And, and as you said, this idea of the value of HR, I think that that affects a number of different things in HR. It's very much firefighting or it's certainly in the last few years has felt very firefighting. And we talk a lot about where is work going generally. And there's never that time to stand back. And then if you don't have the evidence, we haven't got time to get evidence and really look at this, it means you're constantly on that back foot. How can we overcome these obstacles in HR? What are your suggestions here? 

Rob Briner (20:50)

Yeah. In the last Corporate Research Forum report we did, we asked a range of chief human resource officers and other HR leaders who've attempted to do some of this stuff, what they as leaders think is important. And they came with quite a lot of interesting things. So the first thing is, I think, that seems really important is to get the shift in the function is to role model this. 

In other words, as a leader, you don't, if you're sitting in a meeting or discussing with a colleague, what the issues, what you need to do, you role model asking questions. You role model uncertainty. You role model saying, we got this wrong. You role model saying, I've changed my mind because I've now looked at some evidence. So you role model that process .

And part of that is also saying, if you come to me or as a team, if we come together with a proposal, we need to see the data and evidence on which you base this. What is the issue and how do we know and what can we do about it? Why are you suggesting that's more likely? So lots of kind of role modelling stuff, I think, around this. 

I think that the second thing that's quite important in relation to that is I think having, and it's linked in a way to the first, having a bit of humility and saying, I don't know. I don't know what's going on. The business thinks there's this problem. I don't know yet what the issue is. So I don't know. And I don't really know the answer is. And that's part of the kind of role modelling thing too. 

I think a third thing is the idea that evidence-based HR is not the same as people analytics and there are some important differences. People analytics is definitely part of it, but it's not the same thing. And I think evidence-based HR is not something these leaders say that should be done by a little elite team. So almost everyone, not everyone, most people in HR who have anything like approaching any kind of strategic role at all, everyone should be doing this. You don't say we're doing the day job in HR, most people over there are the evidence-based brainiacs. No, it's the way we just work as a function. I think that's really important. 

And what a lot of these people said also was , again, working with the senior management team, ExCo, is starting with the business issue. Is that you never go to ExCo with a sort of solution to a problem, which is irrelevant to the business. You always start off trying to understand what the business is trying to do and indeed sharing as a function your understanding of that issue and sharing with ExCo as a function your evidence about why you've decided to take these steps in HR, what the evidence is for it. So to demonstrate you're actually doing this. So I think there's quite a lot of things to do. 

It's a bit, I guess some people might call it a cultural shift but I think there's a lot to be said for leadership and there's a lot to be said for the way you reward people. I think again, in the latest CRF report, we also tried to simplify the evidence-based HR model in a way. There's a toolkit there which simplifies it. There's a kind of cheat sheet. There's a, if you've only got 10 minutes to do this, you can try this. And again, for me, it's emphasizing that it's always about making a better informed decision, not a perfect decision. 

So at the end of this process, even if you only have half a day, if by the end of it, you've gone through the process a bit, you will still be more likely to identify what the issue is and what the most likely solution is, than if you haven't done it at all. So don't feel this is an all or nothing thing. You can do some of it. You can make it start making difference even if you haven't got much time. 

Siân Harrington (24:25)

Yeah. Now picking up on that people analytics bit is interesting. If we could delve a little bit more into that. Data, as they say, data is the new oil in business. And not only have we got the more traditional people analytics, we've now got AI, we've got data just like literally coming out of our ears. But can you explain how do these, how does that fit together and what is evidence? Because I know it's not just that data. Sure. So how would you describe evidence and how do traditional areas like people analytics and data itself fit into it? 

Rob Briner (25:00)

Yeah, of course, people analysis is very important, I’m not for a moment saying it's not, but it tends to focus mostly, but not only, but mostly on only one area of evidence. So I've described these four areas. 

So one area of evidence is data from inside the organization, tends to be metrics, quantitative data, maybe it's profit, maybe it's customer service data, some satisfaction data. So stuff from inside the organisation, that's typically a turnover performance that people's analytics is focused on. And that can be quantitative or qualitative. Of course, that's the key part, but that's only one. 

The second area, and people are often very surprised about that, of what counts of evidence, is your personal experience and expertise as a practitioner. You are partly being paid because of the experience and hopefully the learning you have had in your profession. So you will inevitably be bringing that in and you must bring it in. 

But like any source of evidence, you always have to ask two questions. One, is this evidence or information I'm bringing, is it reliable and trustworthy? And is it relevant to the problem at hand? So is it trustworthy and is it relevant? So that also applies to our professional expertise. So typically that's something that people do bring in, but they don't really do it in a very explicit way.

So we might be in a meeting and I say, oh, I think employee engagement's rubbish because in my last organization, we did loads of surveys, we looked at the data and there was no link between engagement performance, so it's rubbish. And you might say, Siân, you might say, but Rob, that was just one organization at one point in time. You're now in a different organization, different point in time. Is it reasonable to say that your experience is good quality evidence here? Of course it's not. But nonetheless, I might strongly have that belief. So that's the second area. And that's quite a big difference, I think, from people analytics. 

The third area is stakeholders. And that, of course, includes the senior management team, includes employees themselves, might include customers and clients. It might include things like unions and other kind of employee groups, representative groups. So talking to them about what they think is going on. 

So a good example of this might be you as an HR team might see a problem. maybe you look to your people analytics data. maybe you looked at your experience and you said, there's something going on here. Let's go and talk to some line managers. And it may become really apparent, even after a relatively short number of conversations, that the thing you thought was going on is absolutely not what's going on. Because they've given you some incredibly important, as it were, insider knowledge that they see every day in their work that you just don't have access to. It's not in your data sets. It's not in your experience that they have actually picked up on this. And it might completely change your mind about what you think is the stakeholders are very important. 

And the other area, of course, is scientific evidence. So if you're dealing with a training issue or a diversity issue, whatever the issue might be in HR or how to increase employee creativity or innovation, whatever might be important for the business, you would also look for the scientific evidence. Okay, is there evidence about, for example, why innovation is important for businesses and business performance? What does innovation and creativity mean? And if it is important to your business, what is the scientific evidence that we can improve or improve innovation, improve creativity? But again, how relevant and how good quality is that side of the evidence you've got? 

So that's four different areas. And people analytics as I said tends to focus only on one. And back to your original question, evidence can mean, I would say, any piece of information or insight that helps you understand that this relevant and trustworthy helps you understand either what's going on, or and or helps you understand what can we do about it. So it's quite broad, actually, as I mentioned, one conversation or two conversations, although it sounds like it could be unreliable, you want to check that out, could prove to be an incredibly relevant and important source of data, much more, say, than your quantitative data, for example, but it always depends on the what's the issue, what can we do about it? So it's very broad. 

Siân Harrington (29:00)

And you touched upon there the mindset. So if professionals want to take a more evidential approach, how do you think they need to change their mindset and what skills do they need to draw upon or even learn? 

Rob Briner (29:15)

I think it's not an individual game. So I'm going to phrase it in terms of a team or a function. The reason it's not an individual game, as I said, for all the reasons, one of our interviewees said it's a team sport because we can't do this on our own as individual HR professionals because we're a system of incentives and punishments, a system of things that are already in place, a system where there's certain kinds of leadership that may or may not like this. It has to be collective. That's the most important thing. 

I think the skills we can bring to bear or the kind of way we approach it is certainly, I think, a lot of healthy scepticism. And just asking basic questions like why a lot? Why do we think this is a problem? Why do we think this is the answer? Why is this data showing us this? Why did this person say this that contradicts with this data over here? I think basic asking questions and being sceptical and having doubts about what's going on around you is incredibly important. 

The other part of it, again, it's a collective thing, is to rather than see evidence-based HR as an extra thing – and again, what one of our interviewers said to us, he said, people shouldn't see this as, oh my God, it's another thing HR has to do. This is not another thing. In my view, it's what we should be doing anyway. It's not an additional burden. It's the way you should be going about your work. All those other things are additional burdens. Just doing stuff. That's the additional burden, not being evidence-based, I think. 

So I think setting up the idea of evidence-based practice in the way you plan projects. So if you know there's something coming up around the corner, or if the senior management team presents something to you and we've got to, we feel now it's a strategic imperative for this business to really up its customer service. And we really think this is what I think is important. Then great, that is your starting point. So you use an HR team, so this is the challenge we've been set. Let's put in motion a project to do this and the project plan is going to follow that evidence-based HR approach. So it's getting something individual and you build it into the way you kind of work around problems or issues that are presented to you. So I think that's pretty important as well. And I think you need to do this in teams as well, because one of the things about doing stuff in teams is that as individuals, we're really bad at spotting our own cognitive biases. 

Again, going back to employee engagement, I might say employee engagement is rubbish. You might say to me, yeah, but Rob., you think it's rubbish because you just decided you hate employee engagement. You think it's a fad. You think it's terrible. So you're just really biased. So whatever we say, you're not going to believe us. And I might be really irritated with you, but I might have to accept, yeah, you may be right, actually. Maybe I'm just really biased about this. So doing it together, that crucial part of saying what's the quality and relevance of this data means that other people can see biases in your thinking and the way you interpret evidence that you can't see. So to me, it's the main of intervention will be a structural change for most function, the way they think about the way they do their job, their work as a function. 

Siân Harrington (32:11)

Great advice there. And it's quite timely because the next podcast I'm doing after this is all about how to ask good questions. So that fits very well with that. So you touched on the old employee engagement, but looking at different parts of HR, do you think there's any areas that are particularly poorly evidenced? And are there any parts of the function or areas that you think you've seen a more of a move towards taking more evidence based approach? 

Rob Briner (32:40)

Yeah, that's a great and tricky question. In terms of different areas, I think, okay, one extreme, I think you have areas which are quite hard to pin down and which people feel they must do something about and they fit into the category that I call kind of the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

And that would include things like D&I and wellbeing at work, for example. So D&I, and again, maybe the landscape is changing here a bit, but with D&I, there's a sense of which people are aware. Yes, there's racism. Yes, discrimination. This is a terrible thing. We need to do something about it. We don't really know what the problem is. We don't know what the solution is, but let's just do stuff. So what you see typically in D&I and wellbeing is a similar kind of issue is lots and lots of activity. Not much, what's the issue for us, our business or organization, what's going on here for us? What are we trying to achieve? What can we do about it? 

So on the one hand, I think you get this road to Hell is paved with good intentions areas, which seem to, they don't follow a particular evidence-based approach because there's just an overwhelming concern to do stuff because it seemed to be morally, ethically important, even if you throw the business case on those things, which to me is a bit dubious anyway, but even if you do. There's this sense of need to do stuff. So that's one end. 

There’s a lot of stuff in the middle, I think, around not defining things very well. So the classic example is an organization says, yeah, yeah, we've got a leadership development programme. It's been running for five years and it's our top 10%, whatever top means, top 10% and we go through this programme. And then you ask a simple question, what do you mean by leadership? And then it's, oh, we don't know. We're not sure what that means or what it is or just what do you mean? It's leadership. And you go, okay. 

So there's a lot of areas in which people, I guess, avoid because it is difficult making, defining, understanding what these broad vague concepts like leadership or performance or motivation mean for them and their business. 

I think there is where probably, there is a bit more evidence and data, and again, I'm quite happy for people to correct me about this, is where you've got fairly good connection between employees' behaviour and some outcome that is important for the business. The closer you can link those things together, the better the chances are that the things you're trying to measure actually are making a difference to the business. And the best of chances are the things you're trying to measure about employee behaviour, you can see whether the interventions you're making are making a difference. So it might be things like around customer service. I'm not saying it's done well necessarily, but in principle, it seems to be those areas where you stand the highest chance of incorporating all these different sources of evidence to look at what the employee behaviour is and what the outcome is. 

And something I think that's often missed is, and again, I'm biased because my background is organisational psychology, but to me, a lot of the things HR is doing is trying to shape employee behaviour in different kinds of ways. And that's often forgotten, whether it's leadership or D&I or whether it's wellbeing or you're trying to change the way people behave, not in a manipulative way, you're trying to shape and nudge, for the better word, the behaviours and attitudes and feelings you think are good or you're trying to do as a business.  

And I think thinking through logically, why would having, let's take the classic annual performance appraisal. Apart from the big question, what the Hell is this for? Why are we still doing it? The idea that you're trying to assess employee behaviours because you think those individual behaviours that you think you can measure them, well, maybe can, maybe can't, it's highly subjective often, but they aggregate up to this team or unit level, which then impacts an organizational behaviour. There's this sense in which logically that makes sense but the problem is you're not actually seeing it, you're not actually finding out if it makes sense. You're making a whole lot of assumptions.  

So again, to be more evidence-based is really thinking through what the model is, the theory is, it says that these things are linked together in a way that's going to impact on the business outcome that's important. So again, being evidence -based, we've talked a lot just about evidence, but also involves thinking a lot about the theories, the models you have for how one thing affects another thing, which is a very important part of it. The more you can do that to your question, the more I think it's possible to take an evidence-based approach. 

Siân Harrington (37.02)
 
And in that work that you're doing with practitioners, have you come across any organisations you think are really leading the field here? 

Rob Briner (37.10)

Yeah, I probably wouldn't want to name them, but there are some. So I would say lots of organizations do this a bit. A few organizations do it a lot. And some organizations do it a lot sometimes, if that makes sense. 

There are examples, in fact, some case studies in the latest report where people have really tried to take this approach, explicitly taken this approach to particular issues they're dealing with in their organizations. For example, they might have to go back to D&I. They may say, OK, the board has told us that D&I is a thing we have to deal with. OK, what is that thing, what's going on?  

So they have quite meticulously tried to gather evidence from these multiple sources to say, what's going on? What's the issue for us? And then whatever those issues are, what can we do about it? And again, gather evidence from those sources. So that's an example of a kind of a project -based approach to one particular issue, one particular organization. 

What I find is it seems to be, and again, this is not very evidence -based, it seems to be quite sector -related. So I think in sectors where, or two things, one, sectors where if you make a mistake, it will have really important consequences. people are much more interested and will spend effort thinking about the way they make decisions, the evidence they collect, recording those decisions, recording the way they made them. So things like any safety critical organization, oil and gas, aviation, it seems to me this is a bit more of a natural fit because if they screw up. it has really important consequences. 

I think another sector where it's quite important is where data is almost part of the organization's business. So if you're serving customers and clients by doing stuff with their data or providing them with data and evidence, I think you're more likely to apply some of those principles in your own organization as well. So yes, there are some examples, not as many as I would hope to see, but I'm hoping with the training we're offering and we have an audit tool as well now, I'll be able to actually go in organizations, work with teams, try actually get them up and running to start to do this a bit. So if you asked me in a year's time, two years’ time, I'm hoping I'll be able to give you slightly lots more of examples of people doing it. 

Siân Harrington (39.27)

Great. Okay. So one of the things that I'm interested is in making work more meaningful, healthy, more inclusive and sustainable for everyone. Now you might say that, where's the evidence that that matters? We can have another conversation about that. But how do you think taking this sort of evidence-based approach can help us to get that sort of better work? 

Rob Briner (39.50)

Yeah, if you just take the first one, what makes work meaningful? It's crudely speaking, the idea that you feel that in your work, you're making a difference to things that you think or the company thinks or the business thinks or the organisation thinks or society thinks are important. That's more or less what makes, I guess any activity feel meaningful. It's making a difference to things you think are important. 

So obviously I think taking an, and I'm biased in this, but obviously taking an evidence-based approach means that you, if you always start off with what are the issues, what's important, and you really focus on those, and then you decide what can we do about it, it increases the chances that every employee is doing something that is directly or indirectly helping the organization achieve its mission, assuming the employee thinks that's important, so I'm making that assumption, but let's assume they do think it's reasonably important, then it's helping them do that. 

And not only that, you can show employees how what they're doing is making a difference. Now, if you haven't done this, what you'll be doing is tell people to just do stuff. And people just doing stuff, it doesn't, I would say, doesn't typically give a huge amount of meaning in work. So I think of all those things you mentioned, I think in principle, taking this approach in any area of work activity should in principle help enhance all those things about the workplace and how work feels. 

Siân Harrington (41.16)

Okay. And if somebody is now thinking, I really want to start on this journey, I'm going to take the first steps. What would your advice be? What would be the first three steps that they should take? 

Rob Briner (41.26) 

Yeah. I think the first thing is to find resources. So the Corporate Research Forum has quite a lot and then the latest report we did there's an evidence knowledge hub you can look on and find more information about it. So just get a sense of what it really entails. That's the first thing. 

The second thing I think you could do really quickly is really reflect on the way you usually go about doing stuff. How do you normally make these big decisions about what the function is going to do? Think about, do you really get lots of evidence? Do you really understand the issue? And of all the things you do, how many of them are really focused on what the business is trying to do? And if the answer is all of them, fine, you're probably doing a good job. But if the answer is not so many or so much, so why is that? 

And then the third thing you can do is, and it's about making a decision. And that decision is to change the way you go about making decisions. And this sounds a bit weird, but it's just to say, I want to make decisions in this functional. We want to do it in a different way. The way we've done it today is okay, but it could be so much better. We could help the business so much more. So it's always deciding to change the way you decide what it is you're going to do. 

Siân Harrington (42.40)

That was Rob Briner on the need to take a more evidential approach to HR and focus less on doing stuff and more on the why we should be doing it. If you've been inspired by what you have heard, check out his recent work with the Corporate Research Forum, link in the show notes. 

 Of course, an evidence-based approach is not just something that matters in HR. Just recently, Rob was quoted in a newspaper as saying he had a single student show up for a lecture. What can we conclude from this? Is Rob just not a great lecturer? I think we can agree having listened to this episode, that is unlikely. Or is it that in our post -COVID world, more students want to learn remotely and we are perhaps witnessing the death of the lecture? We obviously need to gather more evidence. 

So that's it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening to the show this month. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Follow me on LinkedIn at Siân Harrington, The People Space. And if you want more insights and resources on the changes in work, check out the www.thepeople space.com. This episode was produced by Nigel Pritchard and you've been listening to Work’s Not Working... Let's fix it! Goodbye.

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