This unit highlights the importance of gathering strong quantitative and qualitative evidence to generate meaningful insight and strengthen critical thinking. It also explores how to interpret evidence through an ethical lens to support better decision-making, and why measuring the impact of people practice is essential for demonstrating and creating organisational value.
Table of Contents
Task One
AC 1.1 Evaluate the concept of evidence-based practice, including two examples of where Camellia’s People Team could use it to ensure sound decision-making in people practice.
Evidence-based practice (EBP) is the conscientious use of the best available evidence from multiple sources to make decisions, rather than relying on intuition, fashion or “the way it has always been done”. Barends and Rousseau (2024) define it as asking critical questions, acquiring evidence, appraising its quality, aggregating it, applying it, and assessing the outcome, drawing on four evidence sources: scientific research, organisational data, practitioner expertise, and stakeholder views. The CIPD (2025a) positions EBP at the heart of a profession that is “principles-led, evidence-based and outcomes-driven”.
Strengths. EBP improves decision quality by testing claims against evidence before resources are committed, and it protects against the cognitive biases and management fads to which people practice is notoriously prone (Barends and Rousseau, 2024). It also builds credibility: decisions supported by transparent evidence can be defended to senior leaders. This is directly relevant given the SMT’s criticism that Camellia’s People Department “has never been very proficient at using and presenting data insights”. A People Team that can show its reasoning earns a strategic seat.
Limitations. EBP is demanding: appraising research quality requires skills a “fairly new and inexperienced” team may lack; organisational data may be incomplete or poorly collected; and the approach can slow decisions when speed matters. There is also a risk of false rigour, where weak internal data is treated as decisive simply because it is numerical. Evidence informs judgement; it does not replace it (CIPD, 2025a). On balance, the discipline of combining all four sources, rather than privileging any one, is what makes EBP superior to intuition-led practice, provided the team invests in basic analytical capability. For Camellia the evaluation is favourable: the SMT’s challenge is precisely a demand for evidence, and the incremental cost of doing EBP well is small compared with the cost of another poorly targeted initiative.
Example one: diagnosing the learning and development problem. Rather than assuming what is wrong with L&D, the team should combine the pulse survey data (organisational evidence, analysed in Task Two), focus-group and manager input (stakeholder views), research on what makes workplace learning transfer effective (scientific literature), and the team’s own contextual knowledge (practitioner expertise). This triangulation prevents Camellia from buying a generic training platform when the survey actually points to failed manager-led development conversations.
Example two: redesigning recruitment and selection. Charlotte has identified recruitment as a priority. EBP would mean reviewing internal metrics (time-to-fill, source effectiveness, first-year attrition), consulting the robust selection research showing structured interviews and work-sample tests outperform unstructured judgement (Sackett et al., 2022), and testing candidate and hiring-manager experience, so Camellia invests in selection methods with demonstrated predictive validity rather than habit. In both examples the sequence matters: question first, evidence second, decision third, reversing the common pattern of choosing a
solution and then finding data to justify it.
AC 1.2 Evaluate one appropriate analysis tool and one appropriate analysis method that Camellia might apply to diagnose issues, challenges, and opportunities.
Analysis tool: SWOT analysis. SWOT structures diagnosis into internal Strengths and Weaknesses and external Opportunities and Threats (Armstrong and Taylor, 2023). Its strengths are accessibility and breadth: it requires no specialist software, suits an inexperienced team, and forces simultaneous attention to internal capability and external environment, apt for a cosmetics company in a fast-moving, values-driven consumer market. Applied to Camellia’s people agenda, strengths might include a purpose-led employer brand attractive to sustainability-minded candidates; weaknesses the underdeveloped people-data capability the SMT criticised; opportunities the growth of the plant-based beauty market; threats competition for scientific and digital skills. Its limitations are significant, however: SWOT offers no prioritisation mechanism, depends heavily on the perspectives of whoever completes it (inviting bias), and identifies factors without explaining causes. It is therefore best used as a framing tool whose outputs are validated with data, not as an answer in itself.
Analysis method: root cause analysis (RCA). RCA, using techniques such as the “five whys” and the fishbone (Ishikawa) diagram, works backwards from a symptom to its underlying causes by repeatedly as...
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