La seule association RH indépendente est membre de EAPM, la "European Association for People Management"
Text by Edward Van Houtte & Iulia Cioca
Evidence-based HR (EBHR) is a way to make people decisions in organizations. It’s a day-to-day practice of using the best available evidence and looking at it with a critical eye, to inform HR decisions. By practicing EBHR, your decisions are more likely to achieve the results you expect from them.
What about you and your last decision at work? Are you confident the process and the outcome were good? What if there’s a better way of making HR decisions that makes it more likely to actually get the results you expect? Let’s learn to expect the unexpected.
You might be thinking: “So, what’s wrong with my decision-making methods? I’m pretty happy with how most of my decisions turn out.” You might be, but researchers have looked at how decisions are made in organizations, and their conclusions are not so optimistic, namely: decision-makers use whatever evidence they have at hand, without asking themselves where it comes from and how trustworthy or relevant it is.
And that’s the best-case scenario. Often, decisions are made on the sole basis of intuition or trends. Considering how important HR decisions are – after all, they affect a large workforce in meaningful ways – let’s all try to improve the way we make them.
Since we’re talking about EBHR, what does evidence mean? Do you need a deerstalker and a magnifying glass to find it? You don’t, but you do get to feel a bit like a modern HR detective. Evidence simply refers to information: any data that’s out there and can help you learn more about the alternatives you’re considering and their effects.
Here are the 4 sources of evidence to always have in your backpack:
Scientific Research: Findings published in academic journals in management and other fields, which present some generalizable facts that apply to your specific problem.
Organizational Data: Metrics, KPIs, or any other piece of internal data that can inform about the specific context and past experiences of your organization.
Professional Expertise: Input from people who have been through similar situations in the past, have made similar decisions, and reflected on their outcomes to identify lessons learned.
Stakeholders’ Input: Wishes, concerns, and expectations of the people who will be affected by the decision. This encompasses subjective elements, underscoring that evidence is not limited to purely objective matters.
That sounds like a lot of evidence just waiting to be found! However, not all evidence is equal. Some of it is better and we can trust it more. And since evidence-based decisions need the best available evidence, you need to not only find the evidence but also determine how trustworthy each piece is.
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Unfortunately, in reality, many people in HR are missing from their backpack the key tools to make better decisions. If evidence is used at all, HR people usually look at professional expertise and input from stakeholders. That’s relevant, but it’s not enough to take effective people decisions.
Based on the results of a survey conducted among 950 American HR practitioners, the Center for Evidence-Based Management (CEBMa) concluded:
Most practitioners pay little or no attention to scientific or organizational evidence, placing instead too much trust in low-quality evidence, such as personal judgment and experience, ‘best practices,’ and the beliefs of corporate leaders.
Okay, using evidence sounds nice and it could help you – but how do you do it? If you’re thinking it sounds abstract and far from your daily reality, read on. EBHR comes with specific instructions and methods that you can apply to your next decision.
Making EBHR decisions is a six-step process, which you can follow every time you need to make a new decision. Since each step (luckily) starts with an ‘A,’ you can also mentally store it as the 6 A’s:
Asking: Frame the problem you’re facing into an answerable question. Knowing what you’re trying to solve will guide your efforts to come up with a good solution.
Acquiring: Think of what kind of evidence would help you to answer the question and search for it, amassing all the information from the four sources that are potentially relevant to your decision.
Appraising: Once you’ve collected the evidence, examine every piece of it with a critical eye and determine how much you can trust it and how relevant it is to your situation.
Aggregating: Working with various pieces of evidence will require you to weigh them and pull them together into a coherent cluster that you can use to choose an action path.
Applying: It’s time to apply the evidence, choose your action path, and implement it.
Assessing: Once the decision has been implemented, compare the results to the initial expectations. That way, you can evaluate if the action(s) you chose indeed worked as the evidence suggested, and this can inform future decisions.
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Finally, remember that evidence on its own is useless without a critical mind that can use it – it’s still you who makes the decisions. So, EBHR is a tool you have at your disposal to help you make better decisions. It’s not an algorithm to directly determine the correct solution.
Over the next weeks, we’ll explore each of the four sources of evidence and the steps on how to find them, appraise their trustworthiness, and use them in HR decision making. We’ll be using the 6 A’s as the structure to guide you through the process of evidence-based decision making. At the end of it all, you will have made the first steps towards becoming an EBHR practitioner.
