But is the revolution, if you got one, the one you wanted or expected?

The hottest news is the #MeToo revolution. It is especially remarkable because it was not based in any new legal promulgation but by the rise of consensus that sexual harassment in the workplace really is unacceptable. EEOC can claim it was on the leading edge with its report on harassment, although, as the report acknowledges, there has been previous scholarship on the problem. In particular, that scholarship has highlighted ineffectual efforts to prevent the problem from occurring, not just responding when it happens. Getting control of a dysfunctional organizational culture, well within the I-O bailiwick, has been picked up by attorneys in the advice they give corporate clients. Some commentators have called for “big picture” strategy that seeks to deal with cultures that may support forms of discrimination other than harassment, such as pay inequity.

“The Bridge: Connecting Science and Practice” is a TIP column that seeks to help facilitate additional learning and knowledge transfer in order to encourage sound, evidence- based practice. It can provide academics with an opportunity to discuss the potential and/or realized practical implications of their research as well as learn about cutting edge practice issues or questions that could inform new research programs or studies. For practitioners, it provides opportunities to learn about the latest research findings that could prompt new techniques, solutions, or services that would benefit the external client community. It also provides practitioners with an opportunity to highlight key practice issues, challenges, trends, and so forth that may benefit from additional research. In this issue, we profile CVS Health, winner of the 2017 HRM Impact Award for its implementation of an evidence-based, prehire screening assessment for call center job applicants.

Okay, so the title of this one is a joke,¹ but we should explain it briefly before we dive into the real topic here.

It rubs our sensibilities the wrong way when we hear about hiring practices that are anything but ironclad, legally defensible, and well validated. The use of unstructured interviews or clinical decision making or gut intuition, instances of nudging the results of a mechanical decision-making process if one doesn’t “like” the results, people hiring based on liking the cut of one’s jib – or, as we joked in our title, hiring based on similarities in musical preferences.² Perhaps it rubs your sensibilities the wrong way as well.

Over the recent years, influential industry analysts (e.g., Bersin, 2016; Haak, 2017) have repeatedly cited the shift to team-based work as a major business trend warranting a fundamentally reshaped approach to talent management and organizational structure. These disruptive forces are driving workflows that are less often hierarchical from a long-term supervisor and more often lateral among project-based teams, and processes that are less often serial and more often parallel using agile methodologies. Additional interest in workplace teams is also on the rise within major I-O publications such as the Journal of Applied Psychology (Mathieu, Hollenbeck, Knippenberg, & Ilgen, 2017). These trends piqued our interest in understanding the major trends across technologies that have shifted the way we work since our Modern App review of virtual working in Jan 2015, and to see what is top of mind in today’s practice and for today’s researchers.

In our previous column, we discussed the complexity and nuances of measuring unobservable psychological phenomena and the importance of verbally communicating the value of reliability and validity evidence to non-I-O psychologists. Our interviews with Fred Oswald, Jeff Jolton, and Don Zhang were insightful, impactful, and extremely well-received by the SIOP community. However, we also received some feedback from I-O psychology practitioners that emphasized how much more frequently they communicate in the forms of charts, figures, and PowerPoint decks than simply in conversation, making it difficult to apply the lessons learned from our last column to their current roles. In fact, it is common in the business world to have your PowerPoint decks “walk” around the organization after your presentation, meaning that you must create your presentation to be interpretable and easily understood even without talking points to accompany the slides.