In a previous post, I talked about how transitions in people’s lives are critical in changing behaviour. They are too in the workplace:
- For new teams forming as a result of a new programme or new staff (i.e. Cooperative Council, FGX, etc.)
- For new partnerships or collaborations as a result of a change in commissioning or practice (i.e. Collaborative Commissioning, Commissioning Academy)
What is the objective behind developing these? Your role is crucial in this process. For instance, learning and training programmes?
I commissioned the University of the Arts to co-design a programme that helped staff develop and apply cooperative behaviours as part of our Cooperative Council programme.
We started with the vision that people’s motivations are shaped by their values and needs. They began by understanding how new commissioners and service managers learn. We wanted to root the learning programme not just in how people wanted to learn or needed to learn but also in their daily activities so that the learning could fit into these and explore how to influence others to work cooperatively.
What principles for learning?
Through this discovery, we identified the following behavioural design principles:
- Messenger
We are heavily influenced by who communicates information
Action to help to learn
- Create ways for a person’s colleague to share how the activity helped them.
- Create ways for their manager to communicate the need
2. Incentives
Our responses to incentives are shaped by predictable mental shortcuts, such as strongly avoiding losses.
Action to help people learn
- Show people how much time and how many resources each learning activity will take
3. Norms
We are strongly influenced by what others do
Action to help people learn
- Show how other people have used the learning
4. Defaults
We “go with the flow” of pre-set options
Action to help people learn
- Encourage other people to share how they’ve used the learning.
- Suggest specific frameworks and methods for people to develop their behaviours
5. Salience
Our attention is drawn to what is novel and seems relevant to us
Action to help people to learn:
- Use different ways to communicate with varying styles of learning
6. Priming
Sub-conscious cues often influence our acts
Action to help people learn:
- Use language evoking the behaviours.
- Create situational cues and cultural probes to reinforce learning
7. Affect
Our emotional associations can powerfully shape our actions
8. Commitments
We seek to be consistent with our public promises and reciprocate acts
Action to help people learn
- Get people to share their commitment publicly through Yammer, email or in 1:1 or team meetings
9. Ego
We act in ways that make us feel better about ourselves
Action to help people learn
- Get people to share what they learned and how it improved their performance.
Ways to embed learning
- Make it easy
Reduce the ‘hassle factor’ of taking up an action. The effort required to act often puts people off. Reducing the effort required can increase uptake or response rates.
Making the message clear often results in a significant increase in response rates to communications. It’s useful to identify how a complex goal can be broken down into simpler, easier actions.
Action to help people to learn:
- Produce specific templates to apply these methods.
- Show links between their behaviour, the impact and the improved performance.
- Show links between the method, the behaviour and the framework.
- Show links between the behaviour and the community outcomes
2. Make it attractive
We are more likely to do something that draws our attention. Examples of this include using images, colour, or personalisation.
Design rewards and sanctions for maximum effect. Financial incentives are often highly effective, but alternative incentive designs — such as lotteries — also work well and usually cost less.
Action to help people learn
- Use diagrams, icons and design patterns to describe the process.
- Extrinsic and intrinsic motivations should be used.
- Get people to use volunteering days to work and foreshadow community group
3. Make it social
Describing what most people do in a particular situation encourages others to do the same. Similarly, policymakers should be wary of inadvertently reinforcing problematic behaviour by emphasising its prevalence.
Use the power of networks. We are embedded in a network of social relationships, and those we come into contact with shape our actions. Governments can foster networks to enable collective action, provide mutual support, and encourage behaviours to spread peer-to-peer.
Action to help people to learn:
- Show how other people have used the learning using videos.
- Encourage other people to share how they’ve used the learning.
- Create ways for people to share their learning.
- Get people to immerse themselves and see how others are learning
4. Make it timely
Prompt people when they are likely to be most receptive. The same offer made at different times can have drastically different levels of success. Behaviour is generally easier to change when habits are disrupted, such as around major life events.
Consider the immediate costs and benefits. We are more influenced by costs and benefits that take effect immediately than those delivered later. Given their influence, policymakers should consider whether the immediate costs or benefits can be adjusted (even slightly).
Help people plan their response to events. There needs to be more clarity between intentions and actual behaviour. A proven solution is to prompt people to identify the barriers to action and develop a specific plan to address them.
Action to help people to learn:
- Promote when people need to write their personal development plans and appraisals.
- Show people how much time and resources each learning activity will take.
- Get people to think about what might make it challenging to complete the learning activity.
How would staff use the learning so it wasn’t just a workshop but part of an ongoing activity? How can the methods help people want to learn? What learning styles would you like to learn more about?
What do you consider as the critical factors in embedding learning? What improvements would you suggest? What obstacles do you encounter in this process?
