Culture statistics, don't believe every headline you read

One of the hardest parts of my job (tiny violins at the ready…) is analysing statistics in reports to verify whether the headlines that sit atop them are correct. If I want to use and attribute them in any way - presentations, workshops, blogs - then it’s important to check their validity. It would be very easy to see a headline and cite it, without checking the facts first.

Take an example from today. My Google ‘Culture News’ search, returned a result with the headline ‘£28.5 billion a year cost to UK economy for workplace disciplinary investigations.’ It’s drawn from a discussion paper by the Faculty of Public Health. It’s a real report, published this week, however, this headline comes from The Workers Union in their reporting of its release. 

The £28.5bn figure isn't new (I thought I recognised it). It comes from a 2021 Acas report, built on a CIPD survey of 2,211 people, fielded in 2019. That's roughly 0.008% of the UK workforce, one person in every 12,500, 7 years ago. Not a great sample size and at a time - pre-COVID - when work was very different (although in fairness many of the issues still exist).

But here's the part that should worry anyone who repeats statistics for a living. Of that £28.5bn, 79% comes from resignations and dismissals, not from running the investigations themselves, as the headline infers. 

The actual cost of grievances, disciplinary cases and dismissals combined is estimated (it can never be accurate) at £12.8bn. This is still a headline-grabbing number, that’s worth discussing. However, it's less than half the figure in the headline.

A more careful report would still amplify the £12.8bn but emphasise that most of the cost sits in people leaving, not in the disciplinary process itself. 

None of this means that the Faculty of Public Health is wrong to raise the alarm or that those at The Workers Union aren’t doing a good job by their members in raising this issue. I know from my own experience that poorly run investigations cause real damage; to the person under scrutiny, to the manager running it, and to everyone else watching how it's handled.

However, the report's best statistic isn't the £28.5bn number at all. It's what happened at Aneurin Bevan University Health Board in Wales, where they treat an investigation as a last resort, not a first response, have cut disciplinary cases by 71% and saved more than 3,000 sick days in the process.

That - for me at least - is the story that’s worth telling. Positive proof that changing how you handle conflict can change what it ‘costs’ you. But, as a newspaper editor once said, ‘bad news sells’, so here we are.

In a world where millions are now asking AI to find statistics and information to use in business cases, presentations and legal briefs, it’s a subtle reminder to always check the substance before you repeat the headline.