 Welcome back. This is the second knowledge clip to the book evidence-based human resource management what we know about people in workplaces. In this clip I will dive into the question how to do evidence-based human resource management. So after this clip you will understand the following. First I'm going to explain to you that decision making is difficult and it's that you're always hindered by something called bounded rationality. Then I will dive into the evidence-based human resource management decision making process. Eventually in the end of the clip I will tell you what the benefits are of evidence-based human resource management. So let's have a look at bounded rationality. If you work in an organization many things are happening at the same time and decisions are always under some kind of pressure which makes managing people in workplaces difficult. There's always problems and all these problems are always urgent and it's really difficult to have all the information about all problems continuously at hand. There is always somebody yelling that there needs to be a solution now. There's always someone who has the solution and in my experience as an HR manager the solution often always involves we need more people. Well this might be nice but may not always be the right solution. Maybe you're doing things wrong. Maybe people are just not trained in the right way to deal with the work. So actually understanding the problem and the causes of the problem are very important. Hiring more people is not always the answer. It can be. It's not always. So examples like we need more people or I know a solution. This is the best consulting tool that is out there. Our competitors are using it as well. We need it to you. These are all called quick fixes. Quick fixes are solutions to problems that arise in the workplace that are not really well thought through. They seem nice. They are maybe cheap or sometimes they are really expensive and sometimes they are used to fix something for which the problem is not entirely clear. So quick fixes in a way are expensive fixes. They seem nice and quick but they are not. Two problems. The first problem is the problem of bounded rationality. I already mentioned when there are problems when we can't find enough people. When the production lags behind. When competition is suddenly innovating and we don't do anything. We don't know exactly what causes that we lag behind. We really miss the knowledge of the entire complexity of the problem. And that leads to making decisions difficult. And it leads to quick fixing solutions with interventions to make at least some decision. Well quick fixes they are not as effective. They are sometimes very expensive and sometimes they seem to work for a short while but then in the end they do nothing or make things even worse and then they need a new fix. So these two things together learning to understand the problem and avoiding making too fast decisions and making wrong decisions are central to evidence based management. Bounded rationality what is it? Bounded rationality means that all of us no matter who you are we lack a complete insight of a problem and all its causes. It's just a given. It hinders our decision making because if you want to take a decision you have to make a decision without knowing everything. And bounded rationality is a fact. It's there to stay. But and that's very important to know there are strategies to add a little bit more rationality to decision making. So instead of running rushing to a quick fix you may use a little time to get a little better insight in the problem and to think a little bit longer about what might actually help to solve a problem. So unfortunately decision makers often neglect these strategies or they're just not aware of them and in this book we'll try to make we will make an effort to teach you a little bit about that. In the rush to solve a problem managers decision makers rush to quick fix quick fixes. Evidence based human resource management is a decision making strategy that can help practitioners to overcome bounded rationality and base their decisions about human resource problems on a little bit more rational background in order to eventually make better decisions. So evidence based human resource management. What is it? It's a method for practitioners. So it's not something to do about doing research. It's about doing practice. However it's a decision making just method for practitioners to consciously so thinking apply expertise what they already know and judgment. So trying to understand which information about the problem about solutions is actually good information. Method for practitioners to make better decisions. How to make better decisions. These practitioners use evidence from their local local context so from their department from their organization from the context of the organization and then they apply this to the decision but not alone. They also turn their eyes to research evidence so they critically evaluate the best available external research evidence. Local context local evidence from the organization in combination with research evidence published in research journals. And finally but not the least they should take the perspectives of the people who are affected by the decision into account. This can be in many ways this is partly an ethical responsibility. So you need to make sure that nobody is harmed by by an evidence based decision. And also as part of the local context so perspectives of people involved in the in the decision are also often the ones who know best about the problem. Evidence based human research management a method for practitioners using evidence from the organization the local context using evidence from research and take along the perspectives of the people who are involved. In a bit more detail this is a summary of all the steps of an evidence based human research management decision making flu. I will zoom in to the different elements in the next few slides. I think in this slide the most important arrow is the one that's going from the button to the top. And then the book you'll see that there are also arrows from each of the steps in the project to the arrow that flows back. Because learning about a problem sometimes also just means rethinking the problem and reconsidering whether it is a problem or reconsidering who is affected. So decision making not in a entirely rational way but learning along the way as well. Now in the next slides I will zoom in to the different elements of the decision making flow chart also using an example. To start with the first part this is about the problem and identification. It is about really understanding what the nature of the problem in the organization is and to formulate a question that will guide the evidence-based information collection and building of the intervention. So these are some of the questions that you should ask before you engage in formulating a question. What is happening? What seems to be the underlying problem? What are the affected outcomes? What would improve in objective measures if the problem was fixed? Who are involved in the problem? Which domain of HR practices seems to be the most relevant? Well the last question will help you to already narrow your question a little bit. Let's take an example to clarify this process. I'll take an example from a call center of a governmental organization and there are many people working there and their job is rather repetitive and monotonous. They have to answer the phone and there's always a queue of questions from clients that they have to answer and they are on a tight performance schedule they need to really answer the questions within a certain time because they have this desire to be really client oriented and that makes the work pressure in these jobs quite high. So the manager of this call center is facing a problem namely in their customer care in their client care department there is a high level of sickness absenteeism and there's a high level staff turnover. Well given this in the current labor market is really difficult to find replacement this is an issue if staff leaves then the other people need to do even more. So sickness absenteeism and staff turnover these are measurable outcomes that this manager is really caring for and wants to improve. The company doctor gave some information he says that a lot of stress and burnout complaints are part of the sickness absenteeism so organizations they have some kind of medical support and the company doctor or however it's organized they have information on the general level about the nature of sickness complaints and if these are work related then it's feedback to the organization to work on. So burnout and stress there's a problem there. Also this organization keeps exit interviews which is a common good practice to interview people leave the organization to find out what their view was about the organization and what the reasons are why they leave and because they are no longer employed they don't fear being punished for being open and fair and this is actually a good source of information to find out what's wrong at the organization. So in this case the exit interviews receive many complaints about the high work pressure the high work paste it's never done it's never good. So this input can help us to specify the specific outcomes the intended domain of HR practices and the people in the organizations which are the target group for the HR practice. In our example the intended outcome are the stress symptoms reported by employees and that translates in sick leave time and you might also say in reduced employee turnover levels. So the most direct measure here would be the keeping track of stress symptoms in employees and see if there is a reduction if you implement proper HR practices targeting an improved well-being of workers. So the targeted groups are the the customer care employees in this governmental organization and the intended human resource management domain will be work design because it's it's it's it seems to be a question of how to organize the work and to make sure that people feel less stressed about it but then what can you do. So the government organization posed the following question for the evidence-based HRM project how can the work design be improved to reduce the reported stress symptoms and sickness absenteeism by employees of the cost customer care department of this governmental organization. Okay then you have a question and you can move on. So your task now is to try and understand what the causes of this problem are and what we know about how the causes relate to the outcome that they want to improve and how this translated or known in in the work design practices. Like said we need two sources of evidence we need no local evidence and external evidence. Let's dive into that. So as part of the external evidence we should ask the question about what do we know about the science of effective interventions for the problem that we have at hand. So to give you some examples where do you find this external evidence? There are many ways to go about it but you need to be smart. If you would just go to an academic library you'll find plenty plenty research articles and we can basically do your dissertation about it. That's not what we want. We want to have fast access to the key research evidence that can help us to make better decisions. The strategy set follows you can start using the book because the book gives a nice overview of the of many theories and in particular in our case in the example you can turn to chapter eight where there is a whole section about stress theories and work design. In combination you can be clever about finding research evidence. Once every while researchers publish a summary article about all the research that has been done before. We call this a systematic review or a meta analysis. These are excellent sources of information that you can use to find interventions that were really effective. It needs a little bit of understanding of research methods but given that I talk to academic students mostly this is actually your task. You're trained to do this. To find the literature that will help you make better decisions that will be your contribution to organizations. In the book in the end of each chapter you can find already an overview of such meta analysis so the book can be a nice starting point to quickly find your way to the best research evidence. Are you done then with collecting evidence? No you're not. You need to also go to the organization and really understand what is known in the organization. So what do people in the organization know about the problem and about interventions that might work have been tried in the past. So this means really going to the organization and collect data from the organization from the people that really experience the problem and there are many ways to collect local evidence. You can make a huge project out of it but you can also keep it small. So it's your task as a practitioner using evidence-based human research management to design a method to collect data in the organization to have a better understanding of the cause of the problem. And you can do many different things so use your research skills. You can conduct interviews with people who are currently experiencing the situation and what they think that would improve their work and this would be a type of qualitative research. Sometimes you can also think about collecting data through using a questionnaire or use a questionnaire that has been used in the past. So for example sometimes a good source of information are employee satisfaction surveys. Sometimes you can also use records from the company to administrative data such as absenteeism records or report by the company doctor. So all these kind of data are either to collect or just to grasp from the organization in order to make better, to get a better understanding of the problem. You need to remember that when you design research that you also take into account good research practice. So think about the measures you use, think about the type of interviews, think about all you learn during your research methods courses and consider the ethics of the people that are involved. Also think about the costs. So you can make an extensive project out of it but you can also try to decide which is the information that is really key to understand the causes of the problem and what is the best and quickest way to get this information. So these are all kind of questions that you should consider when you develop an evidence-based HRM project. So after you collect the information then you can sit down and then the fun part begins. You can evaluate all the evidence you had and start developing an intervention. So how do you evaluate the quality of evidence? Again this is a step where you can really use the skills you learned in your research methods courses to make better decisions eventually. So it's always about validity, reliability and generalizability. Questions you can ask about validity, does the evidence help you to really understand the problem? Did you ask the right questions to the right people? I'll give you a clue if your problem is about employees and you just interview one manager you'll not know the problem. But also critically evaluate the quality of your measures, your review questions, the research design and use good theory. So that's why in the flowchart I often start with the external evidence part because if you know a little bit what is known out there then you can fine tune it to the context of your organization which is easier than the other way around when you start from scratch in the organization then you have to find all the the theory that is out there that is more inductive if you want to be fast you can better maybe use a more deductive way. Reliability, so is the data you collected, is it a one-off or is it possible to replicate it? So will you find the same information if you ask if you repeated your research in your organization and that has probably to do with how many people were asked, who was asked. What's your sample size for example? And finally think about generalizability, so the information that you collected does it generalize to the population that you targeted for your intervention. So these kind of questions should be in the back of your mind when you evaluate the quality of your evidence and there are quick tools to make a list of your evidence and to rate the evidence and to make sure that you take the right evidence into account when you design an intervention. So the real fun part is here it's about thinking using all the evidence as reflecting on the problem and brainstorm about potential interventions and I'll highlight what you can do in order to make sure that you develop an intervention that can actually land in your organization. It works as follows, how to design an effective HR practice. First of course obviously the choice and design of your practice will depend on the local and external evidence you collected. Then if you sit together with your research team you can list all you can list which interventions will be the most effective given your external evidence. So have a look at the external evidence you collected from research and all the interventions that follow from your literature. Then also list and do the same for what you did with your local evidence. So what are the conditions for effective interventions? What are things that they tried before and didn't work for whatever reason? So you can stripe out some of the things that you thought of using the external evidence. Then decide in the end which of all the potential interventions is the most effective and you can be critical. Also consider costs and time of implementation and the difficulty of it. Oftentimes if you find something simple that is effective that's preferred over something that is complex and effective. And then finally if you decided on the one intervention you think will be the the largest impact on the things you want to improve. Prepare the organization for the intervention. Communicate to those who are involved in the implementation. So make sure the senior management is into your project. Communicate with employees of course since you involve them already in the collection of local evidence they would know something is going to change about their problem. And use the evidence that you collected to explain why this intervention is supposed to be most beneficial for the problem that you have. Don't forget very important oftentimes when an evidence-based project is done the project team is dismantled it just stops the intervention is done everybody happy but it's very important to keep tracking whether the with the intervention works. So evaluate pick a date to evaluate whether your intervention really improved the outcomes that you that you wanted to improve in the problem. So how to organize this the evaluation of a new HR practice. A good project thinks about this before closing down. So a good project team plans the evaluations of the implementation and they also decide which data they will continuously collect to check if the intended outcome really improves after implementation. Organize follow-up. If the program team is dismantled make sure there's somebody who takes responsibility to follow up this can for example be organized in the HR department which is quite common. And also use this as a means to check for continuous improvement. Here the so going back to the example of the hard workload in the call center after the intervention has been decided in this case to be to use some flexible working. Following up and discussing with employee representatives about the effect of the intervention will lead to fine tuning and will lead to maybe also new questions. And this way like said organizations will continuously learn and improve and be better places for people to work in. Wrap up. Now you know. It all starts with the problem of bounded rationality in that happens in decision making about people in workplaces. And evidence-based human resource management can help to improve decisions because it offers a decision making process to overcome not solve but overcome bounded rationality. We discussed also the stages of evidence-based human resource management and we highlighted this with an example. I hope you'll use it.