Many researchers agree that HR practices can improve employee and organizational performance. The reason is simple: if an organization hires the right people, trains them, and allows employees to decide how they want to do their jobs, we can expect a happier and more productive workplace. The organization also has a good chance of outperforming its competitors. However, some have questioned whether these effects are long-term. That is, if an organization invests in its HR practices today, will employee or organizational performance continue to improve in two, three, or more years?

So far, much of what we know has come from cross-sectional studies that only look at data from a single point in time. Longitudinal studies, on the other hand, are less common, but they examine data over a longer time period. They can, for example, tell us whether an organization’s HR practices are as effective today as they were in the past. Surprisingly, many longitudinal studies have found conflicting results, with some suggesting that HR practices are less likely to improve employee or organizational performance in the long-term. This is not to say that HR practices are unimportant; rather, their observed effects tend to fade over time.

To illustrate, imagine how organizations are sometimes so busy with other business priorities that they forget to pay sufficient attention to HR practices. Then, over time, HR practices become vulnerable to the organization’s established norms or bureaucracies that render them less exciting. Likewise, employees may become bored of doing the same HR routines over and over again. This means that, contrary to what cross-sectional studies have led us to believe, it is possible for an organization’s HR practices to become less effective over time, unless they are regularly updated. This situation is especially true for public health care organizations, where traditional bureaucratic processes are more likely to reduce the quality of work.

Our data and findings

Using six-year survey data from the British National Health Service (NHS), we conducted a longitudinal study, published in the Journal of Management Studies, to better understand the long-term effectiveness of HR practices. The NHS is a public health care organization and one of the largest employers in the world. Due to strict safety protocols, healthcare regulations, and government policies, the NHS often finds it difficult to modify and update its HR practices regularly.

Data were collected from around one hundred thousand NHS workers who talked about their experiences with HR practices such as how much autonomy they had at work, how involved they were in the workplace, how their performance was evaluated, and how training activities helped them to perform better. They also described how satisfied they were with their jobs. Next, we looked at data from about a hundred thousand patients who rated the overall quality of health care services in the NHS and gave feedback on how well the organization was doing.

In a nutshell, we found that HR practices had little or no impact on how well the organization performed over a six-year period. In other words, if the same HR practices are used for a long time without being changed and updated on a regular basis, organizations should not expect the quality of their services to improve over time. Another important finding was that HR practices could actually affect how satisfied employees are with their jobs, but this effect tends to fade after three or four years.

So, what are the key takeaways?

Overall, our study challenges conventional wisdom and raises critical questions that should make us think. Truly, HR practices allow organizations to manage employees’ jobs and get things done, but over time, they can lose their effectiveness and have no real impact on employee or organizational performance.

The key lesson from our study, therefore, is that organizations should not overlook their HR systems. If they really want to improve performance in the short, medium, and long term, HR practices should be modified and updated on a regular basis. Of course, we know that other business priorities may compete for the same resources required to improve HR practices. However, as we’ve seen in this study, paying less attention to HR practices means their effects will weaken over time and eventually stop producing good results.

Managers and HR leaders have an important role to play. They should, for instance, adopt more flexible policies that enable them to challenge the status quo, overcome bureaucratic norms or routines in the workplace, and come up with better ways to continuously improve their HR practices. This might include adding new activities to existing staff training programs to make them more exciting, making regular update to improve performance appraisals, changing their compensation schemes to recognize and reward employee creativity, and putting more effort into hiring talented workers that bring fresh ideas into the workplace. In this way, HR practices will become less static and able to keep up with changes happening both within the organization and in the external business world.