The One Where HR Stops Assuming and Starts With Evidence with Prof. Rob Briner

Rob Briner: To be evidence-based in any field, from medicine to policing to management, whatever it is, a really important first point is to try and clear the decks of it. So when we as professionals go into decision-making situations, we are full of these kind of ideas. Some of them may be really valid. Many, in my view, may not be. So you need to unpack some of the assumptions you're making. So for example, if you're thinking about, how can we improve our engagement survey? What should we do? But because the engagement scores have dropped, you say, wait a minute, you don't even know why engagement's an issue. Let's stand back and find out if it is for you or more generally, then we can start. They're good questions to ask, but not yet. So think a lot of this is clearing the decks and getting this kind of misleading, biasing stuff away, which is quite difficult. So I to be evidence-based means sort of starting there and challenging quite a assumptions that we make about the issues and problems we're dealing with. And obviously that's not easy, but it's doable, think.
David Clutterbuck: Welcome Rob to our new series of podcast We like to start off by just getting to know the other person. Now we've known each other for quite a few years, decades or two.
Rob Briner: Yes, yes we have David, yeah, yeah.
David Clutterbuck: But tell us, for the benefit of the listeners here,
Rob Briner: Sure.
David Clutterbuck: tell us a little bit about how you became you.
Rob Briner: Okay, I don't know, but I can tell you some of the things I've done. I don't know that would explain it. Might explain some of it. So yeah, I guess I started off with quite a traditional kind of academic career in that I did an undergraduate degree, did a master, did a PhD. Without really actively choosing it, I decided to be an academic because it's an obvious thing to do after PhD. So the first 20 years of my academic career, I was at Birkbeck. University of London that you know well David and there I spent most of my teaching working with mature part-time students often working in HR, often organisational psychologists and they were, I was often, I was quite a bit younger actually than quite a lot of students so it's a great training for me because I was coming with all this kind of academic stuff and papers and meta-analyses and quite often the students would say that I don't agree with that or that doesn't make sense to me and I was thinking Well, how day this is published in the best. This is great science. And for a while I thought they were wrong. Then maybe after five or 10 years, I realised they were right and I was wrong. But essentially, a lot of the academic stuff that's around isn't actually very applicable or very relevant or very useful. And I guess from that point, I kind of got really interested in evidence based practice in HR and management and organisational psychology and other fields, because I thought the issue here is, yes, we can't rely. this scientific evidence. So it's important to look at multiple sources of evidence and also simply saying to practitioners here's a meta analysis, off you go, use this data is also not particularly helpful. So since then I suppose I've become really interested in how scientific evidence and other forms of evidence can be used together to help practitioners be more effective and that's driven by lots of things I guess partly because waste really annoys me. So when I see
David Clutterbuck: you
Rob Briner: HR functions, do lots of stuff. And I think why are you doing this? What's the point? And it's of course, not just HR, it's about many professions. So waste annoys me. I think often, again, in any profession, people make you all kinds of assumptions about the stuff they're dealing with that aren't particularly accurate. And therefore, they're making quite ill-informed decisions, which again, are not going to help them as a professional. They're not going to help the organizations they serve either. So that's kind of a bit of background about where I came from.
David Clutterbuck: Thank you. mean, the core of this series and the book that we're putting together is about the fact that so much of HR practice is linear thinking.
Rob Briner: Hmm.
David Clutterbuck: And if you're thinking linearly, you're probably missing most of the evidence.
Rob Briner: Yeah, and I think there are circumstances when, depends what you mean by linear of course, but think there are circumstances where linear is okay. But again, to determine whether you need linear or some other kind of thinking, you need evidence as well and theory and stuff like that. So yes, I think that kind of X causes Y sort of very direct thing is possibly useful sometimes, but in general, life is a bit more complicated than that. Yeah.
David Clutterbuck: Yeah, I think we're acutely aware and some of the other guests we've had have clarified that so much of what's happening is actually not having the impact that HR expects because it is this simplistic, unevidenced practice. like performance appraisals, for example, being...
Rob Briner: Yeah.
David Clutterbuck: having very little, there's no evidence that performance praise was overall actually improved performance.
Rob Briner: And more generally, I think one of the motivations is partly waste, but it's also because I think the professions I'm more familiar with, such as HR, such as organisational psychology, I think they could be doing so much better. I think in principle, what they do is really, really important, can make a real difference to people's lives, to organisations and even to whole economies. But on the whole, think they just could be doing so much better. And I think evidence-based practice is one way in which you can think about how we do a better job.
Riddhika Khoosal: On this idea of doing a better job, Rob, if you had to pick three HR ideas that are almost universally believed, but
Rob Briner: Yeah.
Riddhika Khoosal: don't really hold up to the scrutiny What would they be and what actually happens when you really start to dig into the evidence around these?
Rob Briner: Yeah. Yeah, it's a really good question, Radhika. I think one challenge is I don't know what HR believes the university believed because I don't have the data, but I can have a guess at some that appear to be so that it may be these don't apply at all and people just don't believe in some context. I think there's different categories of these kinds of belief and certainly the work I've done with corporate research forum and with something called the Work Psychology Network is try to review some of the evidence around some of these beliefs. For example, I think there's a category of things that clearly quite strongly believed, but are fairly obviously when you look at the literature, just probably not correct. It may be in the future we get more data and it suggests they are correct and effective, but at the moment probably not. Davey's example of appraisal, annual performance appraisal is a good one. There's other things like generational differences, learning styles, 70 % of change initiatives fail. the change curve, the emotional reaction people have to change. These are sort of beliefs that when you go and look at the evidence, scientific evidence and any other forms of evidence, it's pretty clear they're probably not very accurate. So they're quite easy to in a way say, people think that it probably isn't the case. However, there are, say, more fundamental, more long term beliefs that HR might have that are a little more complicated. require a little bit more pulling apart. And the good example of this is the link between job attitudes and job performance.
David Clutterbuck: Hmm.
Rob Briner: So historically, people used to use satisfaction measures quite a lot job satisfaction. And in the last 20 years, engagements being the thing people looked at. And so what I guess organizations try and do is they believe that things like satisfaction, engagement are linked to performance. So they take measures maybe every six months, every month, every year of say some of the organisation's engagement. If it goes up, thumbs up, wonderful stuff. If it goes down, oh God, that's terrible. Fine. So what's the evidence around that? Certainly very, very few organisations I've spoken to, they make the assumption there's a link and have not tested it in their organisations. So it may be there's one in their organisations, but most organisations do not know. What happens when look at the broader evidence around the link between job attitudes and job performance? Well, again, historically, let's go back to job satisfaction has been around since 1930s, 1940s. It is still described, this job satisfaction, job performance link or happy workers, high performing workers, it's still described as the holy grail in that it's something people really want to find. It's seen as incredibly valuable, but it's still pretty hard to find. Broadly speaking, Attitudes are not very strong predictors of behavior and this is something H.R. General believes they really are. So, you know, commitment, satisfaction, engagement, organization identification and then spend a lot of time working around this, but they may actually not be very relevant. Where attitudes are linked to behaviors, they're very specific attitudes. So it might be like, what is your attitude towards a certain kind of food? That attitude will predict quite well the behavior you're going to display around that food. Not perfectly by any means, but more than saying, do you generally like your job? It's a kind of fairly meaningless sort of attitude. People can love their jobs and be performing very poorly. They can absolutely hate their jobs and be performing fantastically. So this is a really fundamental thing that it's quite hard to shake because it's because it's been around for so long. And in that sense, it's not a fad or a fashion, maybe like things like the change curve or generational differences or learning styles. It's quite an enduring sort of idea. So that I think that's one of them. I think the second one is around teams. So again, this is a report I did recently for the World Psychology Network, a corporate research forum. A common assumption is putting people together in teams means you're to get good performance out of them. Now, there's lots of historical data that suggests that isn't true, but there's lots of more recent data. well. And if you go into the scientific evidence theory and start unpacking it, you'll see that yes, of course, our circumstances sometimes where teams do perform better in some tasks in some ways, that individuals doing that work. And what you also get is a phenomenon, which again, I think is quite common in organizations, of what some people call pseudo teams. So people put together in a
David Clutterbuck: Yeah.
Rob Briner: group, they're told they're a team, they're managed as a team, but they're not doing team So again, this sort of assumption seems a good thing. And I think the final one of these more broad things is that job performance is kind of to do with hitting targets and reaching goals and is therefore quite easy to measure. One of the word or an idea I find quite kind of irritating is the concept of deliverables. Everyone's quite obsessed with deliverables and go, okay, that's fine. But what are the circumstances under which these deliverables might be important? Well, the first thing is they have to be linked to organisational performance. So it's quite possible you get a whole organisation, everyone's hitting their targets, everyone's hitting deliverables, but the organisation is failing because those targets are not linked to what the business is trying to do. The idea is this kind of cascade. Yet, I think a common belief in HR, as long as perhaps going back to the idea of annual performance appraisals, as long as people have targets, as long as people have deliverables, as long as we can tick them off whenever the time period is great, we've got performance down and I just don't think that's the case. So I say there are three broad ones as well as those little ones that I mentioned at the start.
David Clutterbuck: Those are wonderful. You make me think of a very quick and dirty piece of research we did. We went out to CEOs and HR directors in several countries. asked them, do you think we need to move the emphasis of recognition, reward and development more towards the individual, more towards the team? And over 80 % of them said, it needs to be much more on the team.
Rob Briner: Yeah.
David Clutterbuck: And since then, we've spoken to an audience and said, have you actually made that shift?
Rob Briner: Mm.
David Clutterbuck: No. We still actually strengthen the individual rewards and then the focus on the individual.
Rob Briner: Yeah. And also at same time, you could say what percentage of your workforce is in real teams? What proportion of the work that needs to get done requires teamwork? It may be 100%, it may be 5%, depends on the business, depends on the work they're doing. And again, writing this report really made me reflect on the contingencies. So people love teams and I can see why people said we have to reward teams because people think teamwork is a way to get work done. Absolutely sometimes, but sometimes absolutely not. And you'll be mismanaging performance if you put people in teams that aren't teams and give them team rewards because they're not a team.
David Clutterbuck: What's your view, Robert, about some of this, what I would call pseudo-science,
Rob Briner: Hmm.
David Clutterbuck: things like Tuckman's Forming, Storming, Norming to Performing,
Rob Briner: Yeah.
David Clutterbuck: which was based on people who were in mental health, I mean...
Rob Briner: Exactly, I mean, there's typically, when you go, when you look at it in a bit more detail, when you look at the data level and indeed where it's from, quite often, even if you go back to the source, it wasn't really what the research was saying to begin with. Another really good example of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, if you go back to the source, Maslow didn't say any of those things about hierarchy, he never said any of those things. Other people got hold of it. And I think it's the same with Tuckman's forming norming storming. Also, think it's very true things like the change curve. So the emotional change curve, as you know, is based on Kubler-Ross model of the stages of grief people go through. Firstly, my understanding is that model is based on the stages of grief individuals go through, not what people around them. Secondly, if you look at the data about do these stages of grief actually exist, my understanding is having looked at journals, sorry, articles in journals with wonderful types like death studies. In death studies, if you look at some of the articles and they say, well, actually, it doesn't appear to be either people who are grieving because they are dying or loved ones are dying, they don't seem to go through these stages. So often if you go back, it's not even really the case that that's what that was about. But I think they grasped hold of because they're very, very appealing. You know, the idea
David Clutterbuck: Yeah.
Rob Briner: people go through these stages, whether it's team development, whether it's in a chain, it's sort of, oh, right, I've got this, I've got to look at and it helps me understand. But of course, it doesn't help you understand. because it's quite inaccurate.
David Clutterbuck: I'm laughing here because for some reason it's just reminded me being in Carrie Cooper's office years and years ago and he's got a journal, the Journal of the British Psychosomatic Society and I couldn't
Rob Briner: Mm.
David Clutterbuck: help but think but how do they know they exist?
Rob Briner: Mm-hmm
David Clutterbuck: And there's something I'm not quite sure what the connection is, but it just made just making a connection with it all. That's
Rob Briner: Yes, I think it was the Journal of Death Studies, yeah.
David Clutterbuck: right. So so if if we want to actually take an evidence based approach here,
Rob Briner: Yeah.
David Clutterbuck: what do we need to do? What does it look like when organizations try
Rob Briner: Yeah,
David Clutterbuck: and do this?
Rob Briner: yeah I think number one is so again I've written lots of stuff and I don't call it debunking anymore and I don't like debunking because if you as you know if you debunk a strongly held belief people get annoyed with you and angry with you and it probably retrenches a very small proportion of people will say I love that idea what you're telling me it might not be accurate great tell me more but that's not the way most of us react Most of us say, I hate that, don't like it. So I prefer now to think of some of these things about provoking thought rather than debunking. So you think say 70 % of change initiatives fail. I'm not going to tell you you're wrong. I'm going to say, what does that mean? So what is a change initiative? That's pretty hard to define anyway. What does fail mean? You know, the vast majority of change initiatives have no clear criteria anyway. Thirdly, how do you think people study that? Do you think there was data who studied thousands of change initiatives, which were clearly defined, which had clear outcomes, and actually studied those change initiatives over maybe 10 years, five years? And do think they really measured that? those data don't exist. And it also just seems unlikely, partly because I said it's very clear what fail means. I mean, if you said, yeah, send those change initiatives out mixed results, that seems... entirely plausible. So I think it's not about saying you're wrong, it's about saying let's think this through and the same with things like learning styles, like well what does that really mean
David Clutterbuck: Yes.
Rob Briner: and it's a preference but you know the fundamental psychology of how people learn, doesn't so much depend on what how you think you learn, you learn whether you kind of know it or not or whether you like it or not, you still learn. So we're talking about preferences rather than kind of matching things. I think it's not about debunking however To be evidence-based in any field, from medicine to policing to management, whatever it is, a really important first point is to try and clear the decks of it. So when we as professionals go into decision-making situations, we are full of these kind of ideas. Some of them may be really valid. Many, in my view, may not be. So you need to unpack some of the assumptions you're making. So for example, if you're thinking about, how can we improve our engagement survey? What should we do? But because the engagement scores have dropped, you say, wait a minute, you don't even know why engagement's an issue. Let's stand back and find out if it is for you or more generally, then we can start. They're good questions to ask, but not yet. So think a lot of this is clearing the decks and getting this kind of misleading, biasing stuff away, which is quite difficult. So I to be evidence-based means sort of starting there and challenging quite a assumptions that we make about the issues and problems we're dealing with. And obviously that's not easy, but it's doable, think. I think the second stage is to actually reflect on the way in which we people in general, and I'm generalizing, make decisions when that decision is really important to them. So it could be... choosing a new place to live, changing career, deciding on buying some product which is really expensive or service or whatever. What people tend to do when something is really important to them, they tend to do three things. They tend to look at multiple sources of evidence and different types of data. So they wouldn't just ask one person and get one. Some people do, but they tend to go, I'll look at some reviews of this product here and I'll look at some reviews here. I might talk to some of the people, maybe talk to them in the shop. I'll get multiple sources of evidence, fine, and types of evidence. The second thing they tend to do, if it's really important to them, is take a structured approach. That means they reflect a lot on what they really want or think they need and they think about that quite a lot and get evidence about that. And then they get evidence about the alternatives and the things they could buy or do or the job they could have or the country they want to move to and maybe compare alternatives. Then the third thing they would tend to do is think about the quality and the relevance of that information. So one example I often use when I'm training and it only applies to me because I love eating and love restaurants. In an exercise I do, say, know, where would you go if you're in a hotel to ask for advice about where to eat, assuming you really, really love food. And often people talk about the concierge. And I said, well, you know what? It could be... that the concierge is being paid to recommend certain restaurants. Does that mean you shouldn't talk to the concierge? Not necessarily, but it does mean you have to think they might be biased. Is that a trustworthy of source of evidence? Or similarly, let's take a workplace example. You may say, I've got some evidence here that this HR practice, one business, Google, says it really helped them. Well, is that, are you like Google? Are you actually like Google? So if you are and you've got the same problems, you do the same kind of business and in the same context, great, then maybe that will help you. If you can even trust what Google say, why would you? Because it's internal HR data, which they're probably not going to share. But anyway, so it's about quality and relevance. So those three things, multiple sources, structured approach, think about its relevance and its trust with. That's what people do when it's really important. So again, when I'm training and teaching this stuff, I'll say that transfers pretty reasonably to decision an HR function might be making following those principles. So I guess what that means is if you're presented as an HR function with a business relevant problem, and in my view, HR shouldn't be dealing with things that aren't business relevant and maybe we'll come on to that later, HR spends a lot of time doing things in my view that are not relevant to business outcomes. Let's assuming that a problem is presented. to them like, you know, we have high employee turnover. So someone in senior management or senior managers have got a problem with turnover. What does that mean? It means firstly, the structured approach means what is going on? Why is it happening as well? And secondly, what can we do about it? So the first part of it will be asking questions about where is the turnover? Who is leaving? Does it matter? Is it significant for the business or not? And that would mean looking across these multiple sources of evidence, which in this case and in every case would be what your stakeholders say. So let's go and talk to some managers. Let's talk to some customers. Let's talk to some employees. Do they think there's a sort of turnover problem, for example? Then in second area, we look at our professional expertise. What do we think? We're practitioners. What do we think is going on? What do other professionals, what's their expertise? What do they think might be going on? This turnover. Third area is organizational data. plastic kind of HR metrics. And the fourth area would be external evidence, could be benchmarking, scientific evidence about what causes turnover. For example, set up some clear questions and go over your full sources of evidence to answer what is the issue? What is the problem? When you come away from that, when you get to the end of that stage, maybe there isn't really a problem or it's probably not the problem you thought it was or the presenting problem or maybe there's three different problems around TURNABLE. So you've got a clear idea then of what the issue is you're dealing with. That's one stage. In the second stage, you kind of go through the same process for what can we do about it? So evidence-based practice is really saying what's going on and if it's important, what can we do about it? But it's following this kind of structure because I think in general we, unless you work in kind of an area like safety critical organizations, or high reliability organizations or in some context in medicine, we generally as professionals, we're not used to following any kind of decision making process. And in fact, when I've done training, not with HR people, but with senior management teams, a question that always, think, generally my experience works quite well, is you ask people, how much time do you spend? You're very senior people, you're paid pretty well. How much time do you spend making decisions? They say, oh, 60%, 70%. Okay, great, okay. How many of you have had any training in decision making? And it's normally nobody. And you
David Clutterbuck: Yeah. Yep.
Rob Briner: go, isn't that interesting? Isn't that curious? This thing that is really important that you have to do in any other field, you'd expect people to have qualifications, training, all that kind of thing. And the only people that put their hand up tend to be people who say they've been in the army. for example, or they used to work in oil or gas. They used the idea you should follow a process there. But for some reason, and I guess you could apply this to politicians as well, of course, the more senior people get, the more they say, I don't need to follow any process. And they kind of get quite irritated by it, in my experience, they want to just make decisions and do stuff. So yeah, so that's the basic process. So what's going on? What can we do about it? Those three principles, multiple sources. structured approach and pay more attention to the best quality and the most relevant evidence. That's the kind of idea.
David Clutterbuck: Thank you. You reminded me of a project with a big financial services organization quite a long time ago. were, HR was planning to spend a fortune on all sorts of employee benefits to retain people.
Rob Briner: Yeah.
David Clutterbuck: we put in a mentoring program and said, why don't we actually talk to the mentors with whom people are opening up and just see what is driving people in terms of staying or going with the organization. And the conclusion of that, mentors were united and said, it's very simple. if people want to get advanced here, they've to go up into management roles. And many people don't want to
Rob Briner: Yes.
David Clutterbuck: do that. They want to stay as prepared. They like the
Rob Briner: Yeah.
David Clutterbuck: kind of technical jobs they're doing. So in order to advance, they've got to go somewhere else. And so the obvious answer was create two career streams.
Rob Briner: Yeah.
David Clutterbuck: But nobody had thought. even to ask the right questions, to gather any evidence.
Rob Briner: Yeah, and that's a good example, I think, of an assumption that is being made about this is why these people are not staying and this is what will make them stay. Both those are assumptions which hadn't, I presume, been tested, for example, until you actually spoke to people. So a lot of this is about testing and asking questions about your assumptions. And sometimes that's quite uncomfortable because, of course, you may have very strong beliefs about some of this stuff. You may have vested interests. certain outcomes. If you're in the reward team, you think rewards is the answer and you're a bit annoyed if it isn't, for example. So I think they're invested interest in it and some of it's about slowing down and some of it is about, of course, trying to challenge this bias to action. And again, in my experience, it's so common that that two stage model I talked about where what is the issue, what can we do about it? There's a huge reluctance to stay on that first bit. Again, when I'm doing whole day training stuff, I might say, okay, the morning we're going to do the first bit and that's fine. Then after lunch, we'll do the second bit. And you can imagine what I'm going to say. What happens after about half an hour in the first bit, the morning, everyone's onto solutions. I'm saying, wait a minute, we don't know what the issues are. no, we know enough. Let's just do something. But we don't. And if you go down that route, you'll keep on again and again and again repeating the same mistake which is doing stuff without understanding what the issue is if there's a problem and what you're trying to achieve you just end up doing stuff and it won't really help you have to go back and do it again do it again and again another metaphor i use it's a bit like it's not exactly right but it's a bit like the idea of you know measuring twice and cutting once so don't take the action until you're pretty sure you know what you want to do and that seems to be antithesis And again, it can make HR and other practitioners, it can make it sound as though I'm saying they're being silly and frivolous and they're not. It is not their fault. It's the way they are rewarded. People are rewarded for action and activity. So talk before about deliverables and targets. If you're rewarded for deliverables and targets, that's what you tend to do. You won't be rewarded for process. You won't be rewarded for making good decisions, rewarded for getting stuff done. So that's HR, other professionals like most are rewarded for that. So of course they want to take action because that's what is being rewarded.
Riddhika Khoosal: I'd love to dig in a little bit more Rob around this
Rob Briner: show.
Riddhika Khoosal: idea of being able to slow down in order to make a good decision to effectively diagnose the problem. And you
Rob Briner: Hmm.
Riddhika Khoosal: you did highlight that there is a tendency that we've very quickly tried to move to solutioning, but actually building the muscle to stay
Rob Briner: Yes.
Riddhika Khoosal: in the question. and the discomfort perhaps that can arise in having to do the work of challenging assumptions, speaking to various stakeholders, getting different sources. There's a lot of resource, time, effort and energy that goes into that. If we were to help listeners, the HR profession to start to build that muscle, what advice would you give them practically that they could start to go ahead and Take this forward.
Rob Briner: I'm reminded of course of the Deming quote, in God we trust all others must bring data. Because when I've heard this working well, for example in HR functions, it is often the leadership of that function that really makes a difference. So they will say to their colleagues, yeah, we think this is a problem, but we're not going to do anything about it now. We have to go and find out what the problem is. And they will set deadlines. They will say, well, let's reconvene in a week. You know, again, lot of evidence-based practice is a team sport. You can only do it with other people. So you might say back to those four areas of evidence, you might say, let's now work out what the questions are about this issue we think is an issue. We're not going to think about the solution now. You go and talk to stakeholders, you maybe go and look at the scientific evidence, you go and talk to your people, analytics people, and you think about your professional expertise, ask our colleagues in HR and others, and maybe go outside, professional body. look professional and come back in a week and we'll look at what we think the issue is. So a lot of it is about back to structure is about saying we're going to spend time on this and we're going to do it in the structure. And clearly, again, one thing I think is really important about the structure is there so many distractions to making well informed decisions. So one is a bias to action, another is cognitive biases, another is politics, another is the need for speed. there's many things getting in the way. Having this structure can really help, particularly if your leader is saying, I don't want to discuss this unless we all have data and evidence. We're not going to talk about it. So we have to do this first. And then when that's reasonably clear, I think then do exactly the same for saying, what can we do about it? No, we're not going to, you know, we're not going to come, we're not going to brainstorm, forget that, useless. We're going to go off, ask really good questions and go over those four sorts of things. We're going to come back. and say, these are the different options we think for interventions. These are the likely, what we think of the costs and benefits of each. We've compared them and we think on balance. These might be better than those interventions. So I think a structure is really, really important. And I think the other thing around that is to sort of say, help people to do that, is to remind them of their purpose. If you think your purpose is not just doing stuff, but trying to help the organization, then this is the only way you're going to do it. Doing stuff randomly might help, but if you really want to help and indeed for HR at the moment, you know, as possibly already been the case, know, there's a lot of sense it suffers from reputational problem and there's lots of reasons for that. Some are reasonable, some are not. But I think one reason why it suffers from that reputation is because it cannot demonstrate explicitly and clearly that it does, it is trying to help the organization achieve its objectives and something like an evidence-based practice approach. is actually outward facing as well. It's not just internal. You can say to the
David Clutterbuck: 10.
Rob Briner: Imagine Team, this is what we're doing. This is how we're working. This is why we're doing it, because we're trying to help the business. And this is what's most likely to do it. So it's a bit about leadership. It's a bit about people understanding the model and seeing the benefits. And also I think it's about rewarding people for process and not just outcomes. After all this is done, maybe your intervention doesn't work. That's OK. That's fine. because you've gone through a really important process. It's rewarding the process, not just the outcome. And again, more broadly speaking, when it comes to, we talked about performance before, I think this is one problem is judging people by the outcome is often outcomes are somewhat out of people's control. Unless you work in, say, a very narrow kind of manufacturing or manual work or certain kinds of sales, a lot of the outcomes are really not in your control. What is more in your and what managers on HR can help with is to facilitate and shape behaviors that might lead to that outcome. So exactly the same for HR and evidence-based practice, what we should be rewarding is behaviors that are more likely to lead to the outcome we want, which is to do stuff that will help the business, not just reward stuff that does reward the process. And again, it's a very, quite a different way of thinking, I suppose, about how you do your job.
David Clutterbuck: If we could just look at one of the areas that I'm fascinated by, I've been doing quite a bit of work in the last few years, and that's HR's role within the team of teams. So we've got all these teams in an organization, just as you might have individuals in a team all doing their own thing and not necessarily coordinating, you've got all these teams in the organization who've got a different idea of why they're there, and all going off
Rob Briner: Yeah.
David Clutterbuck: and doing their own thing. And HR seems to have sort of, that's not my problem. That's their problem. Somebody else can organize that. It's a leadership issue, whatever. But we now know, I think, that horizontal communications within organizations are at least as important, if not more important, than vertical. It's a reasonable assumption in the modern environment. That's a system which HR is not necessarily getting engaged with would be a...
Rob Briner: Yeah Yeah, and I mean from way described I would have some sympathy for HR because there's got to be you know Obviously HR wants to draw a line and say look we're not doing line management. You're doing line management, but we can help you do it better So in this context what I would say is what HR should be doing is training and educating people about teams Rather
David Clutterbuck: Yeah.
Rob Briner: than intervening themselves and saying, know talking on the top of my mind we just finished it is in this teams report, we did it for the Works Ecology Network, is educating people about things like multi-team systems. So the idea that this is what you're saying, that there isn't just a group of teams, there are multi-team systems that interact. Individuals have multiple team memberships and crucially, teams aren't necessarily good. So I think there's a proliferation of teams. think one of the issues is not because they're not communicating, is that they shouldn't be in teams. So... Once you've got a clearly, reasonably defined team, which is doing teamwork, it's interdependent, for example, you can then start to think more clearly about how that team should be interacting with all the other teams. But they have to be teams, not just bunches of people. So
David Clutterbuck: Yes. Yes.
Rob Briner: that, me, is a kind of training education HR function we do to help leaders and managers understand, don't just do a knee-jerk team creation. Because if you do... and possibly it's what you're alluding to, you'll create a whole kind of massive problems of huge numbers of teams. Everyone's in the team. Everyone's in seven different teams. No one knows why they're in the team. No one knows what the team is for. It's a mess. Is that a mess HR should sort out in the sense of dealing with it? No, I think it's sort out by making sure, as I say, leaders and managers really understand what teams kind of means and they don't create all these pseudo teams. But yes, I think that's one reason why this messes arisen, it's the underlying assumption teams are good. Indeed, some of the research I did for it, it's quite interesting to think about why people think teams are good. And one researcher said that she thought people think teams are good, because they're often exposed to, from being quite young, things like in school or sports, or they follow sports or they see a team. So they hear the word team, has these really positive connotations. of it's nice, it's good, and also everyone will perform well. And just sort of trying to unpack why there's this automatic assumption that teams are good and the importance of really being clear about when are they good and when aren't they good. And the other thing that goes along with it as well, from the example you gave, is I think sometimes when you've got that level of mess, it's sort of too late to intervene and you need to not... sort of start again, but then you need to think about when we are, when we're going to, if we're going to have proper teams, how do we do it? And there's a, there's a lot of evidence, a bit strong, a lot of theory that says that one of the most important things about teams is all the work you do before there are any team members.
David Clutterbuck: Hmm.
Rob Briner: It's how you set it up. It's how you design it. It's the resources you decide to provide for it. It's how you think to your point, how to interact with other teams. It's what you do before. is enabling conditions as Hacquan calls it. So
David Clutterbuck: Yes.
Rob Briner: it's doing that first as opposed to let's set up loads of teams and let's try and fix them later. So it's sort of going forward, then maybe you stop doing that and do more of set up enabling conditions first.
David Clutterbuck: That fits in very well with the work we've been doing on rapid teaming.
Rob Briner: Yes.
David Clutterbuck: If you want a team that hits the ground running, it's all about the pre-work. It's not about once you
Rob Briner: Yes.
David Clutterbuck: put them together.
Rob Briner: No, yeah. indeed, it's even, yes, it's pre-work without any members as well, not even thinking about members, just what should this team in principle be doing? Who should be in it? Yeah.
David Clutterbuck: so where do we go from here? In terms of actually, you would, if you were. Somebody said I'd like you to become the HR director for let's take a big or great organization. What would be the starting point for HR leadership makes a change?
Rob Briner: Yeah, yeah. So yeah, so another report I did wasn't part of the Work Psychology Network series, it was another report about how HR can drive organizational performance. And it's, it's very similar to evidence-based practice, but it's also slightly different because it's more strategic. Evidence-based practice is more about what you do when you're presented with a problem. How do you decide what's going on, you do about it? The driving organizational performance report is more about like high level strategic. So I think the first thing is, I think for if I was an HR director, the first thing I'd want to do is really understand the business. How does this business organization work? How does it do things? How does it achieve its objectives? What are those objectives? Really kind of understanding those things first. Then I think the second thing is making sure everyone in HR, my team also understands what those objectives are. And as a starting point, I would say one of the first things you need to do going back to this concept of clearing the decks is looking at everything the function is doing and examining where it is actually linked to organizational objectives. If it's not, stop it. If you don't know if it is, find out. And if it is, great. Let's get resources back. away from things that aren't particularly effective. So I think that's really important. And then I think it's a matter of also prioritizing. So my sense is a lot of strategic objectives are not necessarily closely linked to what HR does. Some really are, some are not. And some strategic objectives may involve HR a bit, but may involve other functions as well. So I think, again, to be as clear as you can about where can HR deliver most bang for the buck. If there's like five main strategic objectives, what are the maybe two or three where HR can most clearly make a difference and really focus very carefully on those and actually try and work it out. And then the thing I'd also say incorporating, you know, dare I say it, some psychology, some work psychology, some theory about why certain HR activities why you think they're going to lead to the outcomes you want. Because essentially, I think HR, and I'm biased, psychologists, I'm biased, but I think HR is about shaping human behavior. It's about whether it's training or selection or the way you put teams together or the way you train line managers to sort of act and behave. It's all about shaping behavior. But it has to be shaping these behaviors in ways that are relevant to what the organization is trying to achieve, not about other things. So it's really working out how these things you're doing in terms of HR practices are going to actually shape behaviors. And I think that's really important to think that through using kind of behavioral framework. And then the last part, well not the last, but another key part of it is to assess, to try and find a way of working out whether what you're doing is working. And a key part of this for me is not waiting six months, a year. two years to think is that the training we did, is it working? It's too late. You need to work out what what someone's called intermediate outcomes are. So if you train people to do something, what do you what do you fairly soon expect as a result of that? And what do you think that's going to lead to and then going to lead to and how is that going to lead to achieve an objective? What are the things you can look at quite soon to get a good clue of whether that intervention, that practice is starting to have the effects it wants? When you evaluate it in the short term, is it on the medium term effects? So it's really also trying to understand whether what you're doing is working and if it's not, either revise it or just stop doing it. And like I said at the beginning, if I'm the HR director, it's also about stopping doing things. And I think that's hard for lots of functions to stop doing things. And that's almost as powerful as the things you do, I think, because it frees up resources. It also focuses the mind to say, if this is not working, we are going to stop it. It really focuses because that's the point of what we're doing. We have to do things that help the organisation. they're not, that's fine, we can stop them. So I'd say those kinds of things are quite important. And again, that tends to involve leadership and not only leadership within HR, but the senior management team, CEO, understanding what HR can do, what it can deliver, how it works. From my limited understanding, some senior leaders do understand what HR can do, others don't.
David Clutterbuck: much so yes. I mean when we say leadership here would you see courage as a significant part of that?
Rob Briner: Yeah, I mean, I think again, I would say the HR people I know who, for example, have really got tried to get into evidence-based HR, I would say they are pretty courageous in that they are prepared to say, you know what, this doesn't work. We're going to stop it. sadly, I mean, it is sad because why should that be a courageous thing to do? But unfortunately, in the context in which it is courageous to say this doesn't work, we're to stop it. And you see this in other professions as well, including medicine, example, historically, where people may have engaged in all kinds of medical practices and medical interventions that really weren't working. it took courage sometimes for other people to say, I'm really sorry. You may be the world expert on this particular medical condition, but what you're doing is not helping your patients and even harming them. So in that sense. It's sad it requires courage, but I think it does. I think the other sort of courage that it might require is actually also, again, this is what people have told me in some of the research I've done at CRF, is it also requires challenging the senior management team. So
David Clutterbuck: Hmm.
Rob Briner: senior management team have some objective. If you as a CPO don't understand that, instead of going, well, it's a business thing, maybe they're right. Actually say, sorry, I don't understand the objective. What is it? what are you trying to do here? Because it isn't very clear to me. And again, asking questions, again, sadly, can often require courage. I think it does because it goes against what appears to me to be prevailing ways of doing stuff. And I guess typically that doesn't require courage. it's, know, a lot of this dimension is a bit, it often reminds me of the Emperor's New Clothes thing, that people are saying that the Emperor's New Clothes are lovely. and this new engagement survey is beautiful, the people are going, no, it's not. There's nothing there. There's nothing going on. You're imagining it. I can't remember if it's a little girl or little boy in the story, but the child is going, and they're looking around and going, am I going mad? Everyone else is saying the emperor's clothes are beautiful and lovely. All I can see is a naked man. And certainly some of the individuals who contact me. who interest evidence-based management through HR or evidence-based practice in other fields, actually uses expression, I think I'm going mad. Because everyone's going on and on about this thing that's supposed to be the best thing since life's bread. No one's explaining what it is. No one can define it. No one's showing any evidence that it's going to help us or even what the problem is. Am I going crazy? Others say no, it's just kind of normal, sadly.
David Clutterbuck: If you should describe it, I immediately think of nine box grids.
Rob Briner: Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
David Clutterbuck: And all of that stuff. Radhika.
Riddhika Khoosal: I have a question for you, Rob, that's been bothering me since early in our conversation because you so beautifully took us through some of these HR ideas that don't really hold up to scrutiny. And the
Rob Briner: Yeah.
Riddhika Khoosal: first one you really brought to the table was around this relationship between employee satisfaction, engagement, and being a predictor to productivity.
Rob Briner: Hmm.
Riddhika Khoosal: I've been left hanging with the question, Rob. What does the evidence or the research really show in terms of what is a predictor
Rob Briner: Sure.
Riddhika Khoosal: of productivity?
Rob Briner: Okay, so if you take something like job performance, if you start making a list of what predicts performance, and it's quite difficult to do, this is not definitive. So it'd be things like have you provided people the resources they need to do the job? Have you given them reasonably clear guidance about what is kind of expected of them? Have you ensured that either through selection or training, they've got the skills they need to accomplish that task? Do they have the technology? that works that will enable them to do it. Are they given or do they receive feedback about their performance? My guess is those things explain almost all performance. So the problem is what you're left with is not much else that sort of does. So things like whatever psychological safety or job attitude or personality, whatever it is, you're left with a bit. that might explain a little bit more. So I think attitudes to me is one of those things that you have to take in the context of all the other things that predict performance. So the other way of turning it around is saying, why would it ever explain performance very well, given all these other things are probably much stronger? And it's not as though for most, my sense is most employees, those five things are not sorted out. Most employees don't have the resources they need often. They're not given clear guidance. They are not given particularly good feedback. They often lack the skills they need. These things are not in place. So while they're not in place, everyone's fussing about engagement surveys. Well, wait a minute, are the basics there? So it's a good example of kind of distraction. in relation to the scientific research, whether it's engagement or satisfaction, one of the challenges is that a lot of the research is correlational. So
David Clutterbuck: Hmm.
Rob Briner: you measure satisfaction, you measure performance, whether it's on the individual level or the group level or even broader level and you might get a small correlation that may or may not be practically significant. But the problem is a correlation, you know, may also tell you that even when there is a link between say satisfaction performance, it may be that performance is driving satisfaction. There's also reasonable evidence that when the performance of a business goes up, people start to feel more satisfied. So could be the other way around as well as that way around. So if your job satisfaction engagement is low, why are you intervening? Because that's not driving performance. It's an outcome of performance. It's really bizarre kind of wrong way around thinking. And I think the other thing with correlational and sometimes some causal research is there's often in this kind of example, third variable that's causing both things. So a classic example is how good your line manager is. So if you have a really great line manager, a poor line manager, they will both probably either enhance or limit your performance and enhance or reduce your satisfaction. So it's this third variable, which is affecting these two other variables and giving you a correlation. But those two things aren't linked. It's this other thing that's causing those two. So the whole thing is a bit, it's not a mess. It just requires a little bit of thinking through. Whenever I say to people, know, when have you, give me examples of when you felt most happy, rewarded and engaged at work, what happened before? And they nearly always say without exception, I did a really good job. I performed really well. We won that work. We hit all our targets. We're doing great job. And that's interesting. So all of you say your engagement status is the highest and is driven by your performance. Not the other way around. yeah, so I think it's thought thinking that stuff through a bit. And again, I have to admit, it's not there is, I would say it's not that there is never a link. I guess there's sometimes is, but it's unlikely to be very strong. And if your objective is to enhance people's performance, I would say increasing engagement satisfaction is very, very, very low down on a list of priorities of things you need to do to help people perform better.
David Clutterbuck: We've been talking to
Riddhika Khoosal: Thank
David Clutterbuck: some organisations about their employee engagement surveys and whether they actually do anything. So what do do with it? the basic lesson that seems to be coming back is well, actually, there's not a lot that you can do about it, except to try and do one size fits all broadly across the company interventions. as you described, it's very situational. It's within the team or the individual relationship that the issues arise. And so if you're addressing it at the wrong level, the chances of making any significant improvement, you might pay people more and they might be more satisfied or perhaps, or give them shorter working hours or something and that might make them more satisfied. does that result in higher performance? Can't find any evidence for that at all.
Rob Briner: Yeah. And it's, mean, one response often is a kind of action plan, which is, know, and what I think, you know, I find it sort of amusing is that people pour over engagement data. Maybe it's a seven point scale and they'll compare departments. They'll say, say, Riddhika's department, you've gone down from 5.8 to 5.6. What are you doing wrong? You have to fix that. David, well done. Your department's gone up from a sort of 4.8 to 5.3. Well done. Great work. Absolutely meaningless. It's just what a waste of everybody's time. Unless you know that these minuscule differences really matter. And it's highly unlikely they do. So why are we spending all this time
David Clutterbuck: Rob, that's been fascinating. Lots of things to really think about there. I'm going to hand over to Radhika to wind up.
Rob Briner: Okay, thank you.
Riddhika Khoosal: Just wanted to say thank you, Rob. This has been a fascinating conversation. Time has flown and you know, I could honestly, reel out a whole list of other questions for you, but won't, your mind and the way it operates, the work that you're doing, and the ideas you'll bring to the world, genuinely welcomed and needed. So thank you for all of the, thought leadership that you're bringing to this podcast, but also bringing in the work that you do. So for those people who do wanna connect more with your mind, with your thinking, your thought leadership, what is the best way for them to do that?
Rob Briner: Yeah, I mean, although it is a hellscape, one way is through LinkedIn. I still post it quite a lot. Another way, if you go to the corporate research forum website, you can find my email on that as well.
Riddhika Khoosal: Wonderful. Well, thank you. It's been an absolute delight, Rob, having you here today and definitely plenty of food for thought.
Rob Briner: Thank you. Thank you both for the opportunity to come and talk about this stuff. Thank you.