NYT (Trust the Evidence, Not Your Instincts)

The Problem: Lack of Evidence-Based Practices in the Workplace

In many workplaces, decisions are made based on intuition or ingrained beliefs rather than sound evidence, leading to negative consequences for employee well-being and group performance.

  • This is analogous to medical malpractice, where a doctor ignores research for personal experience, leading to ineffective and costly treatments.

Examples of Ineffective Workplace Practices:

  1. Incentive Pay:

    • Many believe paying for performance works universally, despite evidence showing it's often ineffective.

    • Example: New York City's 56\text{ million dollar} teacher bonus program was ended after three years, as a study found "no positive effect on either student performance or teachers’ attitudes." Similar failures have been documented for decades.

  2. Team Stability:

    • Research shows stable membership is a hallmark of effective work teams; experienced people working together communicate and coordinate better.

    • Managers often rotate people to minimize costs and ease scheduling, despite evidence of negative impacts.

    • Example: 73\% of safety incidents on commercial aircraft occur on the first day a new crew flies together.

  3. Hiring Methods:

    • Unstructured, face-to-face interviews are often biased (interviewers prefer likeable, similar, or physically attractive candidates, regardless of performance).

    • Many other selection methods are superior, such as assessing if a candidate can actually perform the work, yet interviews remain primary.

  4. Excessive Self-Confidence:

    • Can help people rise to power but makes leaders less effective.

    • Overconfident decision-makers may believe usual findings don't apply to them, even when using ineffective practices.

The Solution: Evidence-Based Management

Some organizations are moving towards evidence-based management, using data to inform decisions, even when it challenges long-held beliefs.

Case Study: Google's Project Oxygen

  • For most of its history, Google's leaders believed deep technical expertise was the most important quality in a manager, and that managers should mostly leave people alone.

  • When Google examined what employees valued most, technical expertise ranked last among eight qualities.

  • More crucial attributes: staying even-keeled, asking good questions, meeting with people, and caring about employees' careers and lives.

  • Managers exhibiting these attributes led top-performing teams, had happier employees, and less turnover.

  • Google is now making changes in how it selects and coaches managers, based on this evidence.

Conclusion

Just as evidence-based medicine arose to prevent deaths and wasted money, an evidence-based management movement is needed to address the "human and financial costs of employee disengagement, management distrust, poor group dynamics, faulty incentive schemes and other preventable damage."

  • More organizations need to embrace this approach.