Businesses, management, behavioural science and you.

This is a chapter 1 from my book, Behavioural Science for Business, Health and Self: Bridging the Gap Between Now and Possible. It is also the material we use as part of our successful leadership and safety improvement programmes.

CHAPTER 1 - Businesses, management, behavioural science and you.

The evolution of work.

To start with, let’s be clear; your work or your career is just a construct, an invention, something that we created and perpetuate to keep us busy and provide us with an identity. It’s one of the most powerful norms of today’s society and we are judged if we choose to do something else with our time on this planet.

The evolution of business is quite interesting from an ancestral consequence point of view. There were always jobs to be done, hunting, cleaning, looking after children, making fires, building refuges and all that. Stuff that we had to do in order to survive. We then started to trade, figuring out that we could swap something we had for something that someone else had that was of mutual benefit. The key was, did you have something that someone else wanted? We also worked out that if we didn’t have anything material to trade with, we could trade in our time, our labour, in return for items of use and then of course money. All these behaviours were a product of reinforcement, you got something you wanted or avoided something that you didn’t want as a result of the trading behaviour.

Nowadays we don’t have to work to stay alive. Our every day priorities are never as base as survival and our jobs fulfil our need to keep busy and belong, in exchange for tokens that we can trade for food, clothing, shelter and goods that make our life more comfortable.

The reinforcement we receive from our ‘work’ behaviours has shifted for a lot of us from pure survival to material wants. Some people amass wealth and power through their actions; work is a status symbol as well as a suppressive control tool.

Work was something you were instructed to do and base your whole life around. You were asked by your parents and teachers “what do you want to be when you grow up?” at parties, and at conferences your peers ask “what is it you do?”.

Work has become something that we define ourselves by, the role we fulfil at work says more to others than the person we are at home. It provides many with a fa?ade and place to be someone different. We like to keep our work separate from our private life, separate places, separate ‘friends’, different persona and behaviours driven and supported by detached environments.

Work in many ways prevents us from being who we really are or from being what we want to be. We turn up, day in day out to the same place, an environment that prompts and supports the same behaviours month on month. Our routines are scarily repetitive and predictable. We are prisoners of our daily repertoires until the day we have to retire, when we are then lost, shocked that we wasted so much time on something that on reflection gave us so little. This is what happens to work or to us at work if our time is without purposeful design.

It doesn’t have to be like this, we can see work differently. We can find purpose, change our direction, if we want; we can at least see it for what it is and start to make it something to enjoy. Make work ‘work’ for us as individuals and as a society, rather than something that controls and limits us.

“I don’t want to be a product of the environment, I want the environment to be a product of me.”

Frank Costello.

Making work better.

Applying behavioural science to the workplace can not only relieve a lot of stress by improving certainty, it can actually make work enjoyable and even inspiring. We thrive on positive reinforcement, it’s what makes us take part in our past-times, play sport, love music and so on. Wouldn’t it be great if we worked out how to get as much positive reinforcement out of work as we do our hobbies? Wouldn’t it be great if the people who had the most influence over the environment at work could turn mundane repetitive tasks into fulfilling purposeful responsibilities? Wouldn’t it be great if work could provide places of nurture helping us to make the most of our lives, be good for our health and benefit our communities?

The person that has most control over the immediate environment at work and at home is you. You may not feel like you have control, but you are the main influencer in your environment. Without you, it would not be the way it is. It is easy to think that someone else is in charge or is to blame for whatever your work environment looks like, but actually, you are as much a part of it as the person next to you. If your work is a great place to be, full of positive reinforcement, you are a massive part of that. The opposite is true too of course. If your work is full of punishment and pain, well, that’s you too.

We have a choice, we can get up every day and do the same thing as we did yesterday, or we can break our routines, take control of our lives and live the best that we can. We can do this and still work, we can create places of work that are great places to be.

Jack Nicholson as Frank Costello says in the opening line of the film, The Departed, “I don’t want to be a product of the environment, I want the environment to be a product of me.” That is what I am talking about. We can use the knowledge of behavioural science to take responsibility and take control.

The modern business.

The modern day business is not much different from the basic principles of trade. We all sell products, whether that product is a time/labour service or an actual material object.

A business is a living entity that is dependent on a collection of people brought together from various backgrounds. The organisation of those people is critical to the company’s success and the daily behaviours of the employees deliver the results that determine the company’s success. Business results aren’t delivered by spreadsheets or procedures, they are not delivered by strategies or business plans, they are delivered by the actions of people; their behaviours.

The larger a business grows, the more people it is dependent upon. The more people it is dependent upon, the more risk there is to the business. Why, because people are fickle. We might not like to think that but we are. Our behaviour, as we will explore in this book, is a product of the environment, our actions calibrate to the different environments that we move through every hour of every day.

Large companies try very hard to control their employees and achieve standardisation by creating blanket processes and rules. This approach works to a certain extent but in doing so, it manages to suck any spark of life out of many employees and frustrates many managers who are charged with trying to make an otherwise innovating team toe the line.

Work is changing and many organisations are getting left behind. There are numerous books, research examples and case studies showing the benefits of using positive reinforcement at work. There are more start-ups and innovators than ever before retaking control and breaking the paradigms of traditional business with spectacular results, bringing meaning and purpose back into their and others lives.

A call to the local leaders.

As well as teaching you a bit about behavioural science I hope that I can ignite a hunger in you to see and do things differently. To take control of the environment and arrange your stage in such a way that you really do get the best out of life including work.

As a local leader, which we all are, we have the power to purposefully design our places of work. You can either chose to be a product of the environment or have the environment be a product of you. The later involves you having some knowledge of how we all start off being victims of the environment and then practicing until you are fluent at creating an environment for success.

This is what we are going to get into. This, if you stick at it, could be the most powerful skill that you ever learn. This is where it starts. This is about you.

“Industrialisation is fading as an engine for economic growth.”

Seth Godin.

At the end of every chapter in the book are some 'things to do and think about' to help you reflect on what you have read.

1. What are your thoughts around work?
2. Do you enjoy where you work?
3. Many people’s health is made worse by work, what are your thoughts on this?
4. How can you make work a better place to be?

Thank you for reading

If you're interested in knowing more about how behavioural science can help your business, or if you'd like a free pdf version of my book, please get in touch.