IES Conference: Evidence-Based HR: HR does it with data?
IES’s annual conference, for HR Network members and invited guests, will be held at the Commonwealth Club in London on Thursday 18 October.
Dilys Robinson, Principal Research Fellow
IES’s annual conference, for HR Network members and invited guests, will be held at the Commonwealth Club in London on Thursday 18 October.
The drive for evidence-based HR has never been greater. Cost pressures and squeezed budgets mean that every decision about the workforce has to be justified, which in turn means that HR professionals are being called upon to produce business cases, cost-benefit analyses, and forecasts for different scenarios – maybe including the downsizing of the HR function. HR may find itself needing to fight to keep going the things people value most in their organisations, such as development opportunities, well-being programmes, job enrichment and employee involvement in decision-making. Without the evidence to show that a valued and involved workforce, with worthwhile jobs, is also more engaged, productive, innovative and receptive to change, employee-focused support structures could be seen as expensive luxuries – nice to have, but too costly during a recession.
It’s not straightforward, however. Firstly, the people-performance link is notoriously difficult to prove. There is a lot of confounding ‘noise in the system’ which makes it hard to isolate the impact of investing in the workforce on bottomline organisational results. Secondly, how confident is HR with the harder stuff: numbers, percentages, ratios, statistics? The image of a woolly, soft-edged function can be hard to shed, and HR is still sometimes seen as the function that deals with the consequences and implementation of major decisions rather than a major player in determining the organisation’s strategic direction. Finally, do organisations really make decisions on the basis of evidence – or is it all smoke, mirrors and post-hoc rationalisation? Our conference will be chaired by Imelda Walsh, formerly HR Director at Sainsbury’s – a company that has always taken HR data very seriously.
Confirmed speakers include:
- Rob Briner, Professor of Organizational Psychology at the School of Management in the University of Bath
- Thomas Øyvind Lehmann, Director, Analytics/People & Culture, Vestas Wind Systems A/S.
- Mary Jane Seddon, Senior Manager Reward and Policy, HR, People and Organisation, Specsavers