Separating the wheat from the chaff: evidence-based HR at the HR Network conference

Network News Issue 2

Peter Reilly, Director HR and Consultancy

IES’s annual HR Network conference in October, on evidence-based HR, discussed some unlikely topics: is the evidence base for the utility of banana protectors hard to fathom? Which inanimate objects cause or cure cancer? Which day of the week has the busiest email traffic? How much does the volume of emails vary by age and gender?

Expertly chaired by Imelda Walsh, IES Board Member and formerly HR Director at Sainsbury’s, we heard also more serious academic and practitioner perspectives on why evidence-based HR should be of interest.

As cost pressures become more severe, budgets shrink and internal competition for resources intensifies, one would have thought that evidence-based HR should be growing in significance to encourage a focus on organisational priorities. For example, did you know in reward practice, of every £50 million spent £15 million is wasted? So it was timely that the conference asked the question of how this evidence base could be developed and deployed.

Rob Briner, University of Bath, argued that managers use evidence all the time but often not in a sufficiently systematic or critical way. He saw a role for HR in gathering a wide variety of evidence to improve decision making and deter the tendency to adopt the latest fad or fashion. Yet he bemoaned the fact that HR is not yet an evidence-based area of practice due to, amongst other things, low utilisation of proper research, a healthy scepticism toward new ideas and its CPD not being sufficiently evidence focused.

According to Rob Briner, why are fads followed?

• Promise to deliver a lot and fast
• Appear simple
• New and shiny
• Will make everything alright
• contain anxieties around intractable problems
• Help user feel effective and cutting edge

 The research presented by Penny Tamkin, IES, demonstrated the power of wellconstructed data. She showed the link between skills and performance in terms of individual’s personal success (increased annual earnings), and the success of high performing work practices (with employee involvement and delivery of training and development with the greatest correlation). Further, she was able to demonstrate that the more HR practices that are adopted, regardless of past performance, the greater the increase in organisational performance. This chimed with event chair Imelda Walsh’s own experience at Sainsbury’s.

Our guest practitioners – Vestas Wind Systems and Specsavers – gave practical illustrations of what evidence-driven HR might look like. For the latter, Mary-Jane Seddon, Senior Manager for Reward and Policy, explained that their journey is to move towards the use of more meaningful data presented in a helpful way to managers in order to answer their critical business questions. Much work has been done, for example, on the correlation between customer satisfaction and business performance and the part staff play in this interaction. Giving store managers real-time data on these factors can help speed up responses and drive improved performance more quickly.

The analytical unit at Vestas has been building the business case for employee engagement. Thomas Øyvind Lehmann, Director of HR Analytics, gave this as one of the illustrations of the work of his team. A number of indicators from their staff survey, eg employee satisfaction, intention to leave, well-being, and line manager engagement, were used to examine the link to the bottom line. Results indicated that the most satisfied employee had the most satisfied customers, and this was linked to the company retaining business contracts. The team has also been able to show that high performers are more satisfied than average and the more satisfied the employees are, the more loyal they are to the organisation and less likely to leave.

Both of the corporate case studies presented examples of how to get the Board interested in HR data by going beyond the standard employee engagement survey and into the ways in which staff can impact organisational performance. But they also showed how an enquiring mind can uncover interesting and important findings. Research into email usage at Vestas, for example, examined the question of geographic spans of management control and employee satisfaction. Employees did not appear to appreciate the long working hours of managers within their own time zone (getting emails early and late in the day). However, when working across time zones the manager’s long working day was positive because it meant staff having contact with their boss within their working day.

Another important lesson taken from the conference was not to translate evidence into certain truths. Mary Jane Seddon recognised the scarcity of peer-reviewed literature in the HR field and that this meant practitioners needed to exercise judgement in shifting through the available material – something that Rob Briner doubted happened enough.

The lesson then is that considered and thoughtful practice will be an antidote to faddism and in the long run will deliver better business results. Following the crowd may be safe but it is not the route to competitive advantage. Apple, Google, and Amazon did not get to where they are today through me-tooism!

The 2013 HR Network conference in October will focus on the the theme of engagement, covering topics such as: embedding engagement as a settled way of working, strengthening employee voice, living the values, encouraging creativity, tackling disengagement, and strengthening the psychological contract after major change. Further details will be announced soon.

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