What “evidence-based” really means in People & Culture.
By Julia Powell, Chartered Occupational Psychologist, Project X Partners
Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workplace puts employee engagement at around one in five people worldwide. It’s the kind of number that gets quoted in a leadership meeting, nodded at gravely, and then answered with a new initiative — a fresh survey, an offsite, a refreshed strategy document.
None of those things produces evidence. They produce activity.
After two decades working with senior leaders on People & Culture, the pattern we see most often isn’t strategy failure. It’s a diagnostic failure. The strategy was built on partial evidence, and the partial evidence was treated as if it were complete.
The honest answer to “what’s happening in our culture?”
Most Heads of HR have, at some point, been asked a version of the same question across a boardroom table: what’s actually happening in our culture?
Even from the most experienced practitioners, in the best-resourced functions, it’s usually a combination of survey results, professional intuition, the loudest stories from the loudest managers, and a quiet hope that nobody pushes on the gaps.
This isn’t a failure of HR. It’s a structural problem with how organisations think they measure People & Culture, versus what evidence actually requires.
A survey is a thermometer, not a diagnosis
As a psychologist, here’s the distinction I’d draw. A survey is a thermometer. It tells you there’s a fever. It doesn’t tell you why, and it certainly doesn’t treat it.
That’s not a criticism of surveys — they’re necessary. They’re just not sufficient. Three things separate a number from genuine evidence:
→ Triangulation. One method is an opinion. Evidence is when quantitative data, structured listening and observation point to the same finding from different directions.
→ Representativeness. A headline engagement score can quietly hide the part of the organisation that needs attention most — because the people struggling most are often the least likely to fill in the survey. Evidence means hearing the people the finding is about, not just the people who responded.
→ Validation. Findings that people recognise are findings that stick. Evidence means taking what you’ve heard back to the people who live it, and testing whether they say “yes, that’s us” — before you act on it.
Do those three things and you have something a board can act on. Skip them, and you have a number with a story attached.
You don’t have a data problem — you have a clarity problem
Most organisations I work with don’t lack data. They have engagement surveys, attrition metrics, exit themes, and performance data. The challenge was never availability.
It’s interpretation, and a leadership team that genuinely agrees on what the data means. When five leaders read the same dashboard and quietly draw five different conclusions, the next thing that gets funded pulls in five directions.
That’s the real barrier to change. Not the data. The clarity.
The most human thing you can do
It would be easy to read all this as cold methods, triangulation, and representativeness. It’s the opposite.
Behind every data point is a person who has, or hasn’t, been properly heard. Doing the evidence well isn’t clinical. It’s the most human thing a leadership team can do: actually listen, to the whole organisation, and let what you find change your mind.
When we did exactly this with the global legal function of a major financial services organisation — combining the data they held with structured listening across 1,200+ colleagues in 19 countries — engagement rose across every index, by six to nine points, with a 17% rise in people feeling recognised. The numbers moved because, for once, the evidence was complete enough to act on, and the people could see themselves in it.
That’s what a Discovery diagnostic is built to produce: not more data, but evidence clear enough to make a confident decision — and owned widely enough that people act on it.
So the question isn’t really, can we afford to diagnose properly? It’s are we willing to be told something we didn’t expect?
If you are, the rest is method. See. Understand. Act.
If any of this is recognisable, I’d be glad to talk it through. You can also take our free culture clarity assessment. It’s only 12 questions long, but it will quickly identify your organisation's strengths, friction points, and areas worth exploring further.
