Notes: Trustworthiness takes into consideration not only which study design was used but also how well it was applied. Table reproduced from CEBMa (2017), based on the classification system of Shadish, Cook and Campbell (2002) 4 and Petticrew and Roberts (2006) 5 .
There are two important points to note about using such hierarchies of evidence. First, as we discuss in this guide, evidence-based practice involves prioritising the best available evidence. A good mantra here is ‘the perfect is the enemy of the good’: if studies with very robust (highly methodologically appropriate) designs are not available on your topic of interest, look at others. For example, if systematic reviews or randomized controlled studies are not available on your question, you will do well to look at other types of studies, such as those with quasi-experimental designs.
Second, although many questions for managers and people and HR relate to effectiveness or causality, this is by no means always the case. Broadly, types of research questions include the following:
Table 2: Types of research question
Does A have an effect/impact on B? What are the critical success factors for A? What are the factors that affect B? | |
Does A precede B? Does A predict B over time? | |
Is A related to B? Does A often occur with B? Do A and B co-vary? | |
Is there a difference between A and B? | |
How often does A occur? | |
What is people's attitude toward A? Are people satisfied with A? How many people prefer A over B? Do people agree with A? | |
What are people's experiences, feelings or perceptions regarding A? What do people need to do/use A? | |
Why does A occur? How does A impact/affect B? Why is A different from B? |
Different methods are suited to different types of questions. For example, a cross-sectional survey is a highly appropriate or trustworthy design for questions about association, difference, prevalence, frequency and attitudes. And qualitative research is highly appropriate for questions about experience, perceptions, feelings, needs and exploration and theory building. For more discussion of this, see Petticrew and Roberts (2003).
Even if practitioners wanting to be evidence-based can search for and find relevant research, they are left with another challenge: how to interpret it. Unfortunately, academic research in human resource management is often highly technical, written in inaccessible language and not closely linked to practice. A recent analysis found that in a sample of 324 peer-reviewed articles, half of them dedicated less than 2% of the text to practical implications, and where implications were discussed, this was often obscure and implicit.
Even if published research does include good discussion of practical implications, it’s helpful and perhaps necessary for practitioners wishing to draw on them to understand the findings. This can be tricky, as they contain fairly technical statistical information.
There’s an obvious need to simplify the technical findings of quantitative studies. The typical way to try to simplify research findings is to focus on statistical significance, or p-values. Reading through a research paper, this may seem intuitive, as the level of significance is identified with asterisks: typically, * means sufficiently significant and ** or *** means highly significant. However, there is a lot of confusion about what the p-value is – even quantitative scientists struggle to translate it into something meaningful and easy to understand – and a growing number of scientists are arguing that it should be abandoned. What’s more, statistical significance does nothing to help a practitioner who wants to know if a technique or approach is likely to have a meaningful impact – that is, it does not answer the most important practical question of how much difference an intervention makes.
The good news is that effect sizes do give this information. The information is still technical and can still be hard to understand, as studies often use different statistics for effect sizes. Fortunately, however, we can translate effect sizes into every-day language. A useful tool is 'Cohen’s Rule of Thumb', which matches different statistical measures to small/medium/large categories. 6
According to Cohen:
The rule of thumb has since been extended to account for very small, very large and huge results. 7
Effect sizes need to be contextualised. For example, a small effect is of huge importance if the outcome is the number of fatalities, or indeed, sales revenue. Compared to this, if the outcome is work motivation (which is likely to affect sales revenue but is certainly not the same thing) even a large effect will be less important. This shows the limits of scientific studies and brings us back to evidence from practitioners and stakeholders, who are well placed to say what outcomes are most important.
1 Gifford, J. (2016) In search of the best available evidence: Positioning paper. London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
2 For a discussion of reliability and validity in performance measures, see People performance: an evidence review.
3,4 Shadish, W. R. Cook, T. D., & Campbell, D. T. (2002). Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for generalized causal inference. Belmont, CA, Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
5 Petticrew, M., & Roberts, H. (2006). How to appraise the studies: an introduction to assessing study quality. In: Systematic reviews in the social sciences: A practical guide, pp125-63. Oxford: Blackwell.
6 For a table showing different measures of effect sizes according to Cohen’s Rule of Thumb, see CEBMa Guideline for Rapid Evidence Assessments in Management and Organizations, p 20.
7 Sawilowsky, S. S. (2009) New Effect Size Rules of Thumb. Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods. Vol 8(2), pp 597–599.
CIPD evidence reviews are available on a range of HR and L&D topics.
Barends, E. and Rousseau, D. M. (2018) Evidence-based management: how to use evidence to make better organizational decisions . London: Kogan Page.
Barends, E., Rousseau, D. and Briner, R. B. (2014) Evidence-Based Management: the basic principles . Amsterdam, Center for Evidence-Based Management.
Guadalupe, M. (2020) Turn the Office Into a Lab . INSEAD Economics & Finance – Blog.
Petticrew, M. and Roberts, H. (2003) Evidence, hierarchies, and typologies: horses for courses . Journal Of Epidemiology And Community Health. Vol 57(7): 527.
Pfeffer, J. and Sutton, R. I. (2006) Hard facts, dangerous half-truths, and total nonsense:profiting from evidence-based management . Boston, Mass., Harvard Business School Press.
Pindek, S., Kessler, S. R. and Spector, P. E. (2017) A quantitative and qualitative review of what meta-analyses have contributed to our understanding of human resource management . Human Resource Management Review. Vol 27(1), pp26–38.
Rousseau, D. M. (2006) Is there such a thing as "evidence-based management"? Academy of Management Review. Vol 31(2), pp256–269.
Rousseau, D. M. (2020) Making Evidence-Based Organizational Decisions in an Uncertain World . Organizational Dynamics. Vol 49(1): 100756.
This report was written by Jonny Gifford and Jake Young of the CIPD and Eric Barends of the Center for Evidence-Based Management (CEBMa).
Please cite this guide as: Gifford, J., Barends, E. and Young, J. (2023) Evidence-based HR: Make better decisions and step up your influence . Guide. London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
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To become a trusted workforce advisor, HR must focus on seven critical areas, including business strategy, analytics and, of course, people.
Technology is freeing up HR to take on bigger-picture matters, making the field more exciting, more demanding and perhaps more competitive as well. "We used to be about compliance, party planning and benefits," says Tracie Sponenberg, SHRM-SCP, senior vice president of human resources at The Granite Group, a wholesale plumbing supplies distributor in Concord, N.H. "To some extent, there are still some companies that see HR as a purely tactical kind of role. But the good ones, the smart ones, see HR as a strategic partner."
Even if your job title or your responsibilities have yet to change, it's imperative to start adapting to the new reality now. You can begin by enhancing your skills in seven critical areas that analysts say are key to future success in the profession and likely to be widely practiced by 2025. They include business strategy, analytics and, of course, people.
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2. understand how the company succeeds, hr jobs of the future.
As the nature of HR and of work itself changes, so will the skills you'll need to do your job. What HR jobs could be in your future? Experts offer their predictions: |
Data and analytics will increasingly drive the job of HR―and this is the person who will head the effort. |
This HR professional will focus on the entire worker relationship with the company, from benefits to training to career trajectory. |
New talent acquisition platforms are emerging and evolving. This specialist will comb through them to find those most appropriate for the organization. |
The hiring process should provide job candidates with all the speed, convenience and efficiency of the best online consumer experiences. This person will oversee that effort, ensuring that applications do not simply go into a "black box." |
This HR specialist will help maximize the individual contributions of both management and nonmanagement staff. |
While not technically an HR position, organizational or industrial psychologists use the principles of psychology to develop a more holistic approach to HR, marketing and sales. |
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With competition fierce for good talent, successful HR managers need to give top workers a reason to come to work for them. "If you're not in a global business now, you're going to be competing with global businesses for the very best employees," says Judy Collister, executive vice president and human resource officer at Cleveland-based Park Place Technologies, a data center support company. "You need to create an environment where people enjoy being there and can't imagine being anywhere else."
The 2025 workforce will include not just transient workers (60 percent of Millennials told Gallup they are open to new job opportunities) but also gig workers who pop in and out of jobs on a daily basis. In addition, HR will need to help assess which tasks throughout the organization can be automated and then reskill those whose jobs are affected by automation. A recent Willis Towers Watson survey found that more than half of employers say it will take "breakthrough approaches in HR's role" to deal with automation and digitalization. Meanwhile, some of HR's remote workers will increasingly be very remote―as in, seven or 10 time zones away―as globalization leads to an increasingly diverse workforce.
Some new HR roles focus on creating a powerful employee experience that mirrors the customer experience, says workplace futurist Jeanne Meister. Examples of those roles and the people filling them include: |
, leveraging machine learning techniques and sophisticated algorithms to automate work and create a consumer experience for employees. |
and enhance internal career mobility with learning opportunities and personalized job alerts based on their skills. |
through a merit increase. |
Attracting and keeping talent involves offering (and administering) a benefits package that appeals to the modern worker. That includes not just parental leave and flextime but also caregiver leave, expanded fertility benefits, gender reassignment and transformation assistance, financial wellness programs, and a slew of benefits that support critical life events, says Kathie Patterson, chief human resources officer at Ally Financial Services in Detroit. "Recruitment marketing exists now, but given the demographics and importance of attracting talent, more organizations could add those [benefits]," she says.
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Critical Thinking
A Short Guide to Building Your Team's Critical Thinking Skills
Skills development. Critical thinking is a key skill for HR and all people professionals - it's the ability to think well and to reflect objectively on the ideas, opinions and arguments of others. It can help us solve complex problems and make better decisions, bringing clarity to confusion and increasing our potential to succeed when others ...
Creative and critical thinking is integral to organisational success, but it is too often assumed that employees and organisations either have it or they don't. The truth is that good thinking can be fostered with intentional, structured systems in place for feedback, argument, and reflection. Helen Lee Bouygues is founder of the Reboot ...
Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. ... As an HR professional, it's your ...
Critical thinking is the opposite of instinctive thinking. Emotional intelligence , which complements critical thinking on the outer-core strategic competencies wheel, plays a critical role in the process by helping leaders manage their emotions and understand others' emotions, thereby enhancing their ability to think critically and make ...
Critical thinking is a cognitive process that involves the active and systematic examination, analysis, and evaluation of information to form well-reasoned judgments and conclusions. It is a higher-order thinking skill that requires individuals to go beyond mere memorization or comprehension and engage in deeper, more reflective thought processes.
Critical thinking helps HR professionals to objectively assess each candidate's suitability and make the best hiring decisions. Employee development: HR professionals must identify employees' strengths and areas for improvement, as well as create and implement development plans. Critical thinking supports informed decision-making by ...
13 Examples of Critical Thinking in the Workplace
What Are Critical Thinking Skills and Why Are They ...
How to Make Better-Informed HR Decisions
Critical Thinking in HR
In this topic, we will review how different types of decisions that are asked of HR professionals must be grounded in facts. We will use examples of HR activities, such as employee relations issues, investigations, and performance management, need to have HR professionals think critically and come to solid fact-based decisions.
Why critical thinking is crucial in HR
Evidence-based HR: Make better decisions and step up ...
Little-Known Examples of Critical Thinking in the...
3. Stay Focused on People. Embracing technology doesn't mean taking humans out of the equation. In fact, HR managers in 2025 will have more time to focus on individuals, enhancing both recruitment ...
Critical thinking skills are the ability to think logically and analytically, to use rational judgement, and to evaluate information objectively. These skills involve the ability to identify, analyze and evaluate various types of arguments, to weigh evidence, and to draw conclusions. Critical thinking is a complex process, and involves a wide ...
6 Main Types of Critical Thinking Skills (With Examples)
Critical thinking. Learn the principles of critical thinking in HR so you can interpret large amounts of information, evaluate without bias and make reasoned business decisions. Free for core learning subscribers. Access to the CIPD Learning Hub. £49.50 exc. VAT. Check availability. Free for members. Self-directed.