The Business Case for Evidence-Based HR: Moving Beyond “Just Doing Stuff”

In a world where business decisions are increasingly data-driven, HR often seems to lag behind, implementing practices without rigorously evaluating their effectiveness.  This fascinating and thought-provoking Pop Up with Professor Rob Briner & GameShift’s Julie Drybrough offered a powerful alternative: a structured two-stage process each with six steps that starts not with solutions but with genuine business issues. These may be problems or opportunities but the approach is the same: understand what the issue is, gather a range of evidence from several sources, evaluate its trustworthiness, and pull together the findings before designing any intervention. For example, addressing employee turnover requires first understanding exactly where attrition is happening – who is leaving, and why it matters to the organisation—before jumping to solutions.

We heard, however, that evidence-based approaches can collide with organisational power dynamics:  companies often make decisions first, then cherry-pick evidence afterwards to justify those decisions. The return-to-office debate that exemplifies this tension, with policies frequently driven by leadership preferences rather than evidence around productivity or employee wellbeing. In one striking example, an organisation continued to enforce a no-hybrid policy despite clear evidence it was extending recruitment times by eight months and causing qualified candidates to withdraw. This highlights a critical question for evidence-based practitioners: “Whose voice do we hear?” when gathering evidence.

In terms of the evidence itself, not all data is created equal, and the best evidence-based practitioners use multiple sources, including “hard data” (metrics, analytics) and so-called “soft data” (organisational experiences, stakeholder perspectives). We discussed the importance of “rigorous curiosity” in all of this – the ability of practitioners to become “organisational anthropologists” who can pick up subtle but important signals beyond spreadsheets. Arguably this is especially crucial for those who work in HR where evidence may often come from observing human behaviours.

Evidence-based HR thrives in specific contexts: safety-critical organisations where decisions carry significant risks, accountability environments where leaders must explain their reasoning, regulatory frameworks that demand justification, and organisations with scientific cultures.  This may be because stakeholders in these environments are used to asking robust questions, but substantial benefits could apply to all organisations: improved organisational effectiveness, better risk management, reduced waste of resources, and enhanced ethical standards. Perhaps most importantly, it could visibly shift the work of HR towards addressing business issues with solutions based on a range of evidence sources that facilitate continuous learning and adapt approaches based on outcomes—even when those outcomes reveal complexity rather than the simple answers many leaders crave.