ET20 Sharing client work

It's our 20th episode! Richard and Pilar take a few minutes to look back on their experience of hosting the podcast over the last 20 episodes. The podcast is an important channel for the Future Work Centre to promote and communicate the value of evidence-based practice, making it actionable and accessible.  When we're not recording podcasts, the Future Work Centre works directly with organisations on a commercial basis. This revenue is used to help us fund our wider programme of activity to promote and advocate evidence-practice to organisations, practitioners and the wider public. Our client work keeps us on our toes and helps us learn the best ways to engage and support organisations to be more evidence-based, whilst being sensitive and pragmatic to their specific working environment. Richard shared three anonymised client project examples: Understanding root cause of sickness and absence - we helped one organisation to scratch the surface and better understand what was driving employee absence and worked with them to identify small, but impactful ways to address this issue. Analysis of staff survey data - this is a topic we've talked about many times on the podcast! We've helped a number of organisations to go beyond descriptive analysis to understand what their data was saying, where to target action most effectively and engage with senior stakeholders in feedback and action planning. As occupational psychologists we are well placed to not only understand data, but can use our knowledge of the workplace to put this into context.  Evaluation of a leadership development programme - this is an ongoing project for the Centre and our role is not the design and delivery of the programme, it's to act as an independent evaluator. We will go 'beyond the happy sheet' to understand what's working, what's having the biggest impact and how. We've also looked at what the scientific evidence says about the effectiveness of leadership development interventions in their sector, so that we help the client further refine the programme in the future. These examples illustrate some of the real challenges of being evidence-based and the importance of being pragmatic!