Return-to-office mandates are the ‘opposite’ of evidence-based management

Forcing people back to the office is just one example of where managements are too often failing to take an evidence-based approach. Photograph: iStock

Evidence-based decision making has been around in medicine for some time but more recently it has begun to exert an influence in other domains, such as policing and policymaking. It’s still a fairly new concept in business but one that is gathering pace because it suggests that managers could vastly improve their decision-making if they based it on better evidence.

Managers are expected to make quick decisions under pressure and, as a result, they fail to get to the root of the problem. Far better to stop for a moment and try to understand what’s really going onDr Tatiana Andreeva, associate professor in management and organisational behaviour at Maynooth University, is a big fan of evidence-based management. She says that, in a lot of cases, the pressure being exerted by organisations to get employees back to the office is a good example of its opposite.

Andreeva says that failing to use good-quality evidence to underpin decisions is pervasive in business not because managers are wilful but because of how they’ve been trained. ‘Management theatre’ describes actions taken by people to make themselves feel better about a situation without actually doing anything meaningful to improve itAndreeva cites the example of a manager she worked for in the corporate sector.

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