At MRG, we love research. It is essential to what we do, and it allows us to provide evidence-based advice and insights to our community. We stand by the information we share and do everything possible to ensure that our research insights are accurate and relevant.
There are two essential components to holding ourselves to a high standard of accuracy and relevance:
- First, we need to make sure that we follow the evidence rather than anecdote or one-off results.
- Second, we need to make sure that our research is up to date and reflects current data.
These essential qualities of research have become very salient in the past few months as the global community strives to understand best practices for a situation that is still a moving target. The health crisis itself – during which expert recommendations change rapidly and sometimes drastically based on new information – provides a pertinent example of just how critical it is to be evidence-based and up-to-date. Scientific research needs to follow the evidence, and conclusions may need to be updated as new and more current data become available.
In science we never say that we have proven something. We say that we found enough evidence to support one view, hypothesis or idea. While most of MRG’s research findings tend to be more robust than current medical and epidemiological research, we still need to consider the possibility that workplace trends may have changed. It is because of this that we often update our previous research reports using more recent data.
An example of this is the updated best practice study for demonstrating tolerance for ambiguity. We recently updated the report, which was originally prepared just three years ago. The results turned out to be very similar to those from the previous report. In fact, the behaviors important for demonstrating effectiveness in this area remained the same. What we found were very small shifts in how well each individual behavior predicted effectiveness.
Of course, there are other instances when we show large shifts in trends and lead us to reach to very different conclusions. The only way to find out if anything has changed is to follow the evidence.
We will continue to update our research library to ensure that you have access to the most accurate insights. I suspect we’ll see some interesting shifts in workplace trends in the coming months. I’ll be sharing some of what we are doing to understand the effects of the current pandemic in an upcoming blog post (make sure you’re subscribed to the blog to get the latest updates).
Get the most recent research findings on demonstrating Tolerance for Ambiguity here.
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