Powering better people decisions across the Gulf.
From the evidence to the decision — vendor-neutral research, summarised and sourced, for the people who build organisations.
Latest Decision Briefs
A senior role is open. You can promote someone you know, or bring in an experienced outsider. Which is the better bet?
Decide by what the role has to change, not by where the candidate comes from. Insiders are easier to judge and easier to over-rate; outsiders brought change when they brought experience of that change; and growing leaders from within depends on a pipeline that the Saudi universities studied did not have.
Read→You want recognition to reward the right things. Which criteria can you actually measure, and does recognition tied to them work?
A recognition criterion is measurable when someone else could check it and reach the same answer: a count, a rate against a target set in advance, an observation recorded against a checklist, or a rating from customers the manager did not choose. 'Goes above and beyond' is not one. Whether recognition tied to such criteria works is less settled than the confidence around it suggests. A 2025 review of 43 studies found that most relied on what people said about feeling appreciated: of the 27 quantitative studies, 19 were one-off surveys and one was an experiment. The largest study, of 25,285 employees in South Korea, links recognition to engagement, but its measure of recognition includes pay. In a randomised trial on eight construction sites, sites were recognised only when an audited safety score beat a target fixed in advance, and safety climate improved slightly. The most quoted figures come from companies that sell recognition software. None of this evidence is from the Gulf.
Read→People come back from the course. Does anything change in how they work, and what decides whether it does?
Most organisations judge training by who attended and whether they liked it. The research judges it by transfer: whether people use what they learned. Our evidence is thin and nearly all self-reported: three employee surveys and one employer survey, none of them from the Gulf, plus one review of workplace safety studies that judged results by injury records. Whether people used their training depended on the job they went back to: support from colleagues, feedback, and enough capacity to try it, while heavy demands worked against it. Whether a manager's support matters is unsettled, and the two studies that disagree measured different things: one measured what people did, the other only whether they wanted to. Where outcomes have been measured objectively, in workplace safety, training on its own has rarely moved them.
Read→What we don’t do
We don’t sell software, run certifications, or publish anything we can’t source. When the evidence is thin the brief says so, and when a study sits behind a paywall we cite it rather than reprint it.
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