Employee engagement: evidence vs. HiPPOs | with Rob Briner Artwork

Workplace Geeks

Workplace Geeks is a new podcast on a mission to find and celebrate the most exciting and inspiring workplace research in the world. Hosted by Chris Moriarty and Ian Ellison, each episode explores fascinating work with the authors themselves, capturing practical learning and potential business impacts. Join Workplace Geeks to bridge the gap between academia and business as we explore the diverse elements that can affect workplace experience, employee value and business performance.

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Workplace Geeks

Employee engagement: evidence vs. HiPPOs | with Rob Briner

July 28, 2022 • Chris Moriarty and Ian Ellison • Season 1 • Episode 13

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In this mahoosive episode 13 (whoops 😬) Chris and Ian welcome Rob Briner, Professor of Organisational Psychology at Queen Mary University of London, researcher, teacher, and darling of CIPD, to Workplace Geeks. Rob takes an inspiring, provocative and critical perspective, advocating 'evidence-based practice' to not only aid more robust organisational decision making, but also help us appreciate our fallacies and blindspots. After exploring the method itself, the discussion explores employee engagement, benchmarking (via absenteeism) and the future of work. A Pinderless Ponder this week sadly, but Chris and Ian do their best to cover.

Evidence-based practice is a method to consider the quality and trustworthiness of multiple sources of information, through a structured approach, in order to make more informed decisions. It recognises and values the mutual inputs from our professional practice, organisational data, scientific research and stakeholder perspectives in a considered way. When applied to, for example, the notion of 'employee engagement', it challenges the validity of the premise on the grounds that it is ill-defined, conflated with other ideas and nothing new, ill-measured, poorly evidenced in terms of links to organisational performance, yet overly and mis-promoted. Ouch!

New and improved! 🥳 Use the CHAPTERS feature on your pod player for section timings

Learn more💡🤓

Rob's LinkedIn profile
Rob's own website
CEBMa - the Centre for Evidence-Based Management
The basic principles of evidence-based practice
Some other great resources about evidence-based practice
The (infamous) paper we discuss about employee engagement, plus some others from CIPD on the topic

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