UK 
United States
Dr. Richard A. MacKinnon, insight director, Future Work Centre
Are people who work from home more productive?
Will our open-plan office make people communicate more effectively?
How does coaching work?
Does 360-degree feedback do more harm than good?
Does management training create better managers?
All very good questions, but how often are they asked in the typical HR work environment? Not often enough, if recent data from the CIPD Learning and Development Survey 2015 is anything to go by! Their survey illustrated that only a tiny minority of UK organisations undertake thorough evaluation of their training and development initiatives. The rest? Perhaps relying on “happy sheets” or being forced to move on to other priorities.
How many processes, interventions and systems at work are used or relied on out of habit? How many are based on personal preference, recommendations from others or because that’s the way it’s always been done?
And where there are positive results, do they understand how they work?
Let’s think about organisations that deploy training and development initiatives without any form of evaluation: would things have improved even if they didn’t run that training course? How can they be sure that the training didn’t have a negative impact on the very problem they were trying to address?
Or how about "high potential" programmes? Investment is made in selecting the “best of the best”, nurturing their talent and turning them into future leaders. But would these individuals have been just as successful without any structured intervention from the organisation? Do programmes such as this deliver effective leaders of the future?
HR professionals are under continual pressure to adapt to changing work environments (e.g. flexible working arrangements), demonstrate the return on their investments and deliver value. But sometimes it feels like there is so much conflicting advice from experts and non-experts, it’s hard to see the wood from the trees; sometimes one has to be an expert to see the difference!
So how are HR practitioners supposed to discriminate between good and bad evidence and advice relating to people at work?
The Future Work Centre is passionate about helping people and organisations find and interpret evidence precisely for this wide range of topics. Everything from the impact of technology on how we work and collaborate, how a training or development intervention does or doesn’t work, through to the impact that jobs and the work environment have on the health and wellbeing of employees.
In matters of individual, team and organisational success, evidence has to count. Our mission is to source this evidence, make it available to organisations and the public and support them in evidence-based decision-making.
We encourage everyone to say: where’s the evidence!
There is a clear need for an improved evidence-base in HR and refreshed guidance on CPD activities to support its principles. Let’s turn our attention away from fads and fashion and instead answer these kinds of challenging questions, to build a shared evidence-base for the excellent work HR practitioners really want to do.
