This document outlines an evidence-based approach to improving productivity and performance management. It discusses: - Defining productivity and the focus on performance management - What works in performance measurement based on CIPD research, including that goal setting can be misapplied and feedback is important - The role of evidence-based practice in HR and challenges that get in the way like biases, fads, and strong beliefs - An evidence-based approach to identifying problems and solutions using multiple sources of information

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PRODUCTIVITY (PERFORMANCE):
AN EVIDENCE-BASED APPROCH
Rob B Briner
Bristol 28.04.17

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Outline
 What is productivity? And why we will focus
on performance management today
 What ‘works’ in performance management
and measurement?
 The role of evidence-based practice in HR &
OD
 What gets in the way of evidence-based
practice?
 Implications for roles of HR & OD
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Assumptions: Beyond transactional stuff
HR professionals should…
 …do stuff that addresses important
business/organizational problems (not trivial
issues)
 …do stuff that is likely to work (not stuff that
is unlikely work or has little effect)
 Even more important in public sector?
 Do you agree? If so, how are we going to do
that?
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Public sector productivity &
effectiveness? (LSE)
 Productivity: Ratio of all outputs produced by a
given organisation divided by the inputs used to
produce them.
 Effectiveness: Ratio of the outcomes which an
organisation aims to achieve, divided by the
total inputs.
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Some questions for you
 How many of you as part of your HR or OD
role are involved in measuring and managing
productivity?
 How many of you as part of your HR or OD
role are involved in measuring and managing
employee performance?
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What works in performance
management? (CIPD December 2016)
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Main points (1)
 Goal setting can ‘work’ but it’s very easy to
misapply so it has no effect or negative
effects on performance
– Can detract from important tasks in complex jobs
• Navigating steps or stages to reach goal
• Adapting to unfamiliar situations
• Developing new skills
• Making decisions based on data-analysis
– ‘Do your best’ (rather than specific) and leaning
goals better in complex jobs
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Main points (2)
 Goal-setting central to performance
management and appraisal BUT depends on
accurate progress monitoring and accurate
feedback
 Some short-cycle simple tasks have intrinsic
feedback (e.g., processing forms)
 Other tasks and jobs depend very strongly on
feedback from performance appraisal but…
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Main points (3)
 Performance appraisal may harm performance
 Confusion over purpose (administrative,
developmental, performance)
 Employee reactions
 Huge number of biases and other distorting
factors that mean appraisal is inaccurate and
giving poor feedback
 How performance appraisal needs to be
changed to work ‘best’ depends a lot on
contextual factors
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Some more questions – write down your
answers (1, 2, 4, 6 only)
1. What’s happened to average job tenure in the past 10
years? Up? Down? Stayed same? (UK)
2. Job satisfaction in past 15 years? Up? Down? Stayed
same? (UK)
3. Generational differences in work attitudes? Large? Small?
None? (US)
4. Gig economy? More employees? Fewer employees? About
the same? (UK)
5. World moving faster – more VUCA (volatility, uncertainty,
complexity and ambiguity)? Faster? Slower? Same? (US)
6. What’s happened to UK Public Sector productivity 1997-
2013? Up? Down? Same?
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Why evidence-based practice? The
elevator pitch
 Decisions about both problems and solutions
should be based on the best available evidence
 Evidence = relevant information and data =
scientific findings, organizational/context data,
personal experience, stakeholder perceptions
 All practitioners base their decisions on evidence
but
– Limited attention to quality (and relevance) of
evidence
– Limited sources and types of evidence
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Where did the idea of evidence-based
practice come from? Yes, it’s a ‘thing’!
 1990 Medicine
 1998 Education
 1998 Probation service
 1999 Housing policy
 1999 Social care
 1999 Regeneration policy and practice
 2000 Nursing
 2000 Criminal justice
 2005 Management and HR?
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More materials available online
www.cebma.org
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What is evidence-based practice
 The conscientious (effort), explicit (clarity)
and judicious (critical of quality) use of
evidence from multiple sources to increase the
likelihood of a favourable outcome
 It’s about the process
 It’s not about certainties (this will work)
 It’s is about probabilities and likelihoods
 It is about reducing uncertainty (given our
context this is more likely to lead to the
outcome we want than doing something else or
doing nothing)
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Six step process for identifying likely
problem/opportunity and solution
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Example of evidence-based absence
management
 Suppose you have a hunch or some data
suggesting that absence may be ‘too high’
(whatever that means)
 How would you approach from an evidence-
based practice approach?
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Element 1: Practitioners’ professional
expertise
 Identifying the problem
– Have I/we seen absence problems before? What
happened?
– Based on our experience, is the level of absence here
a problem?
– What do I/we believe about causes of absence?
 Identifying solution (only if absence is a problem)
– Have I/we seen absence interventions before? What
happened?
– What do I/we believe about absence interventions?
– Based on our experience, is the level of absence here
a problem? What are costs & benefits of
intervening?
 How relevant and applicable and trustworthy is
my/our expertise?

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Element 2: Organizational data
 Identifying the problem
– What actually is the absence rate?
– What type of absences and where?
– Are there patterns or trends in absence?
– Do data show how absence is a problem?
 Identifying solution (only if absence is a problem)
– What absence management is currently in place and
is it working?
– What else is happening that might be affecting
absence?
– Are there relationships between absence and other
data? Employee type? Shift? Department?
 How relevant and applicable and trustworthy are
our organizational data?

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Element 3: Scientific literature
 Identifying the problem
– What are the average rates of absence in my sector
and location – is the absence rate here ‘high’?
– What does systematically reviewed research evidence
suggest are the problems with absence
 Identifying solution (only if absence is a problem)
– What does research evidence from systematic
reviews suggest are major causes of absence?
– What does research evidence from systematic
reviews suggest as effective absence interventions?
 How relevant and applicable and trustworthy are the
scientific findings?

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Element 4: Stakeholders values and
concerns
 Identifying the problem
– How do employees feel about and view the absence
‘problem’?
– Do they see negative consequences?
– What do managers think about the problem?
– Do customers or clients or service users have a view?
 Identifying solution (only if absence is a problem)
– How do employees feel about and view the solutions?
– What do managers think about the solutions?
– What alternative explanations and proposed solutions
do others have?
 How relevant and applicable and trustworthy is the
evidence about stakeholder concerns?

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The challenge
 Nobody disagrees with evidence-based
practice in principle
 So why isn’t it happening much (or at all)?
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What gets in the way of evidence-based
practice in general?
 Misconceptions of EBP
 Strong and wrong beliefs
 Individual and group cognitive biases
 Fads, fashions & (some)
consultancies
 Organizational politics/power
 Poor logic models/theories of change
 Over-claiming about the quality and
quantity of evidence (critical appraisal
essential)
 Career incentives
 Pre-enlightenment views
 Not necessarily a lack of or poor
evidence – it’s about the best
available evidence and a process
 A lack of focus on a specific and well-
identified problem (or opportunity)
 Contexts in which practitioners’
practice is not evaluated (it doesn’t
matter what they do)
 Good intentions (road to hell paved
with)
 Erroneous belief that we already are
evidence-based (or evidence-based
enough)
 Access to only some sources/types of
evidence
 The perceived need for speed
 Crude benchmarking
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Misconceptions of evidence-based HR
 Practitioners can’t use their experience - it’s
mostly about scientific/academic evidence
 It’s about the truth and proving things
 It’s about making perfectly-informed decisions
using all the necessary information
 Gathering the evidence will give you The Answer
 It’s about new ‘cutting edge’ ideas and studies
 Experts/academics know all about the evidence
so you just need to ask them
 It’s an academic versus practitioner thing
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Strong and wrong beliefs
 It ain't what you don't know that gets you
into trouble. It's what you know for sure that
just ain't so. (Mark Twain)
 The greatest enemy of knowledge is not
ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge
(Stephen Hawking)
 Ignorance is fine – false beliefs not so
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Some more questions – write down your
answers
1. What’s happened to average job tenure in the past 10
years? Up? Down? Stayed same? (UK)
2. Job satisfaction in past 15 years? Up? Down? Stayed
same? (UK)
3. Generational differences in work attitudes? Large? Small?
None? (US)
4. Gig economy? More employees? Fewer employees? About
the same? (UK)
5. World moving faster – more VUCA (volatility, uncertainty,
complexity and ambiguity)? Faster? Slower? Same? (US)
6. What’s happened to UK Public Sector productivity 1997-
2013? Up? Down? Same?
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1. Job tenure UK
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Job tenure USA
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2. Job satisfaction UK
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USA
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3. Generational differences in work
attitudes?
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4. Gig economy – some US
commentators
 “Slowly but surely a revolution is taking shape – an entirely
different kind of economy. The labor force of new entrepreneurs,
which we call the Gig Economy, is growing a rapidly around
the world and could soon represent as much as 50 per cent of
the US workforce.” (Micha Kaufma)
 “Freelancing is the new normal — and this survey shows
that America’s new workforce is big, crucial, and here to stay”
(Sara Horowitz)
 “We’re in the middle of a sea change in how American
employment works, and that’s a very good thing” (Gene Zain)
 “Gone is the era of the lifetime career, let alone the lifelong
job and the economic security that came with it, having been
replaced by a new economy intent on recasting full-time
employees into contractors, vendors, and temporary workers.”
(Nick Hanauer)
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Gig economy?
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Work Foundation (2016)
 “…there is not much evidence that the gig
economy has so far fundamentally changed
the long term structure of employment in
either the US or the UK. This does not mean
that it will not do so in the future.”
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Resolution Foundation (2015)
 But turn to official datasets and evidence for
this revolution is hard to find. In both the US
and the UK, the share of workers with
permanent jobs hasn’t changed much in
recent decades, and nor has multiple job
holding. The share of workers who are self-
employed is actually falling in the US. While
it had been rising quite rapidly in the UK, it
has plateaued in the past year.
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5. More VUCA?
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Economist: Creed of Speed December
2015
 The idea that time is speeding up is clearly
popular. It is also plausible. There is just one
problem. It is very hard to prove that it is
actually happening.
 Hard evidence of a great acceleration is hard
to come by. The Economist has considered a
variety of measures by which the speed of
business in America can be quantified. A few
do show some acceleration. But a lot do not.
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6. Public Sector Productivity? (ONS)
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6. Public Sector Productivity? (ONS)
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So what? What’s wrong with strong and
wrong beliefs?
 They’re a distraction and diversion
 How might such beliefs affect the decisions a
HR practitioner makes in relation to (for
example)
– Recruitment practices?
– Retention practices?
– Improving job satisfaction?
– The speed with which decisions need to be
made?
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Evidence-based practice can help because it’s
about the conscientious, explicit, and
judicious use of different sources of
information
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Fads and fashions get in the way
 Fads generally act as a barrier to clear and
critical thinking
 Encourage solutioneering – identifying a
‘problem’ by the absence of the ‘solution’ (e.g.,
the problem is our managers have low
emotional intelligence)
 Fads as interventions may be effective but
– Are not the panaceas they often claim to be
– Even if they work, effect may not be large
– May be no more effective than existing interventions
– Can be harmful
– Over-applied – to all organizations and problems
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Based on Pascale (1990)
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The anti-fad fad
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Related concept of the quick fix
 Focus on style and presentation not content or
process
 Not be evaluated
 Not be as quick as had been hoped
 Not be effective so followed by another quick fix
 Become subject to organizational amnesia*
 Can be career-enhancing for managers (e.g.,
issue selling, kick-ass CEOs)
*Kitchen equipment analogy
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Evidence-based practice can help because it’s
about the conscientious, explicit, and
judicious use of different sources of
information
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Implications of evidence-based practice for
HR’s role in performance management (1)
 Understand the performance problem first
– What performance problems exist?
– What types of performance?
– Where?
– How do you know?
– What is the quality of the evidence?
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Implications of evidence-based practice for
HR’s role in performance management (2)
 What are the most likely solutions to those
problems?
 Understand the scientific evidence for how and why
performance appraisals can work (better) – CIPD
report
 Use organizational data to understand biases and
inaccuracies
 Stakeholder views of appraisal
 Clarify purpose of performance appraisals
 Use six steps four sources
 Etc..
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It’s a (sort of) choice
 How do you (and your team) want to practice as a
professional?
 How would you like your (and your teams) skills,
knowledge and effectiveness to develop over the
course (of your possibly very long) career?
 How do you think the profession needs to develop?
 Do you want us to go beyond fads and fashions? If
so, how is it going to happen?
 How can you make sure you do what’s important
and what’s most likely to work for your organization
its employees? And deal with the three hardest
words in management?
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Three hardest words to say in
management?
“I don’t know”
But I know how to find out –
Evidence-based practice
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PRODUCTIVITY (PERFORMANCE):
AN EVIDENCE-BASED APPROCH
Rob B Briner
Bristol 28.04.17