The need for evidence in policy making

You are a community leader or a policy maker. You might be an HR Director or a CEO. You could also be a sports team coach. If you are in the business of improving performance and progressing the future development of your organisation, you will need to make decisions and implement change. Sounds easy doesn't it? You come up with an idea that sounds great and then implement it. It was obviously a good idea so what could possibly go wrong?

Well, here's a real-life case study. A company director decides that putting fruit on everyone's desk each week will improve morale, diet and demonstrate that the company has the welfare of employees at "the centre of everything we do" - to use that well-worn cliche so often trotted out. This is notionally an economical idea, easy to implement and will make people happier.

This simple idea backfired badly. Very badly, actually. Quite apart from the task becoming a tiresome chore for a junior HR team member, the people who worked from home felt discriminated against as their office based colleagues were getting an additional benefit. The office based people, who travelled frequently, would return often finding a shrivelled organic mess on their desk.

But what made both office and home-based workers really mad was that they felt the company was trying to solve problems on the cheap. The sentiment was one of "If they think giving me an apple or banana each week is going to improve things, then they could not be more wrong" Angry exchanges ensued. The writer can assure the reader here that the language has been completely sanitised - but you probably get the idea.

The lesson here is that the well-intentioned director (his view), or cynical, venal and exploitative director (staff view) had not done any homework. Sadly, there was no evidence, at all, to show that fruit provision would have any positive impact. And it was clearly not addressing the prevailing issues and sentiment.

Gauging staff sentiment cannot be effectively done via the annual staff survey. Hearsay and merely "sounding people out" is loaded with risk. For larger, diverse and complex organisations, measurement needs to be continual and yield both quantitative and qualitive information that is gathered completely anonymously and securely.

Policy making, like strategy, is the selection of a pathway from infinite choices. Implementation is only ever given one chance. So, policy making really does have to be evidence based and you do need to know precisely what to fix before you start.

The writer is a Non-Executive Director of NoWorriesApp.com - a digital platform for assessing sentiment and sources of non-wellbeing in a workplace environment.

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