There’s a phrase I absolutely hate that gets thrown around the HR community all the time: Seat at the table. If that’s not on a buzzword bingo card, it should be!
That said, if you want to have a seat at the table, you need to use data. It’s all about the numbers, and not all numbers are created equal. Want to start having a bigger impact in your organization immediately? I’ll show you how.
Benchmarks
Ah, benchmarks, the good ole human resource staple. Benchmarking can be a useful tool, but it’s important to recognize its limitations (and there are a lot of them). Benchmarks tell you what other organizations are doing, but they don’t tell you how what they’re doing is successful. In fact, many organizations see desired outcomes in spite of a practice and not because of it – their other practices (which you most likely didn’t benchmark against) outweigh the detrimental effects of the practice you did benchmark against.
In 1994, United Airlines decided that to compete with Southwest Airlines in the California market, it would begin emulating their practices. After careful benchmarking, United launched a spin-off of their regular service called Shuttle by United. Shuttle featured more frequent flights and shorter ground times. Gate staff and flight attendants dressed casually, and food was not served on the flights.
What United failed to capture, however, was the unique cultural aspects and management philosophies of Southwest that allowed their strategy to be successful in the first place. Those kinds of things don’t show up on a benchmark. Shuttle crashed and burned (a tasteless pun, I know).
Benchmarks, what are they good for? Absolutely nothing, say it again! Motown hit singles aside, benchmarks are most useful in ensuring that an organization remains competitive with local and industry businesses in its management practices. For example, if you want to be known as a company that values work-life balance, you better make sure that you’re offering a flex-time program and paid time off that’s comparable with or better than other organizations in your field and region.
If you want to know what a successful flex-time program looks like, though, benchmarking is not your best bet. You may know other companies’ practices, but the cause-effect relationship isn’t captured in these surveys.
Empirical Data
One of the biggest challenges for human resources is tying HR programs and practices to bottom-line outcomes – but it can be done! And fortunately, really smart researchers have done a lot of the work for you already. One of the best ways to find empirical research is to look at the bibliography or supporting research sections of articles that you read. If you have access to a research database (like ProQuest), even better!
Not sure what an empirical article looks like? They’re the published results of actual research, so they have a section describing the research methodology and provide the data they obtained to draw their conclusions. The only downside to empirical articles is that they’re a bit thick. If you want the same quality of data but something a bit easier to read, try to find review articles, which summarize all the available research on a particular topic, and provide links to the original (difficult to read) research.
Turn Your Employees Into Guinea Pigs
Can’t find research on your topic? Not to worry – use your employees like guinea pigs and run your own experiment. I’m serious!
If you want to implement a new program or practice, don’t release it to the entire company right away. Instead, choose a test team, department or branch and test it on them. It’s important that you establish the metrics that you’re going to measure (the outcomes you’re looking for) prior to your experiment, and collect data on both the test group and the company at large. If the program or practice works on the test group, you can push it to the company at large. And if doesn’t, you haven’t created a big company-wide mess.
Make Big Waves
If you want to start having a bigger impact on the success of your organization, one of the best ways you can do so is through data-based management. Next time you develop a program, put your benchmarks back in your desk.
What’s your process for developing a new program or practice? Share your thoughts below!
Amen to your anti-benchmarking thought. Are you familiar with Jay Barney’s “Resource Based View” of the firm (RBV). It also puts a nail in the benchmarking coffin – suggesting that scarce, difficult to replicate assets are what create competitive advantage. Benchmarking ignores your firm’s unique approach to winning.
@Matt – Thanks for the comment. I had not actually heard of Jay Barney specifically, but was familiar with the concept from some graduate courses I’ve taken in HR. After a quick Google search, it looks like I have some reading I need to do. Thanks for the post!
- Chris