Nudging instead of regulating - a behavioural approach to changing employee behaviour

This month’s newsletter explores how a behavioural approach can be used to align employee behaviour with the aims of an organisation. Seeking a nuanced understanding of the barriers and motivators experienced by employees can lead to behavioural interventions to be more effective and popular amongst employees. This newsletter targets getting employees to come into the office as an example to illustrate our D-BIAS method of tackling behaviour change challenges.

Deciding your target behaviour

The Covid pandemic was a catalyst for ushering in the modern era of hybrid and remote work. As a result, many companies are re-evaluating their set-up to ensure their workforce is motivated and productive. Whether they decide to operate in-person five days a week, go fully remote, or fall somewhere in-between, behavioural science can help them to achieve their objectives whilst maximising employee wellbeing.

The Behaviouralist has team members in Mexico, Spain, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Malaysia, in addition to several in London who balance their time between working from home and our London office. This diversity came about organically during the pandemic as individuals returned to their home countries, and has stuck ever since. Having a partly-remote workforce enables us to widen our hiring pool, retain people who want to move countries, take on projects across the globe, and ultimately create freedom for our employees. But of course it’s not without its challenges. During our recent Away Day we found that our London employees would like to see each other in the office more than they currently do; this essentially resembles an intention-behaviour gap.?

Applying the D-BIAS methodology

To understand and address the barriers that create this intention-behaviour gap, we turned to our D-BIAS methodology (Diagnose Behaviour, Intervene, Assess, Scale-up). This method can be used by any organisation seeking to change behaviour in a non-coercive way - whether that’s to boost employee’s motivation whilst working from home, or to nudge people into the office.?

Let’s assume our aim is to help employees to come into the office more often. The first step is to conduct a behavioural diagnosis to understand employees current working patterns, and their attitudes towards working from home and from the office. What psychological, social, and structural factors act as enablers or barriers of each scenario? Gaining as much detail as possible is essential to guide the next stage - developing interventions. For example, one barrier that we uncovered is that it’s frustrating to arrive at the office and discover that no one else is in.

The identified barriers to achieve the target behaviour should directly inform the solutions implemented. For example, there might be a lack of factors that attract employees to attend the office. If this is the case, then interventions to make the office more attractive such as allowing employees to commute at non-peak hours, creating social norms of having lunch together, and incentivising them with fun social activities on a regular basis may be effective; we use all of these strategies at TB. In our case, if people publicly state their intention to come in on certain days the following week, it would make this information salient, act as a form of commitment, and create visible social norms of attending the office. To implement this we could create a shared document where people check the days they are planning to come in.

Once we’ve chosen a method for tracking our target variable we can select an appropriate evaluation method to measure the impact of their interventions. Using a randomised controlled trial or differences in differences method would require us to treat groups of employees differently which may not be practically or ethically feasible. Therefore, a simple pre-post design while keeping an eye out on potentially influential external factors may be more appropriate. Lastly, if the interventions successfully increase attendance, and perhaps also employee satisfaction, we can scale them up with confidence.?

Every organisation is unique and has its own culture and ambitions, but the benefits of implementing a behavioural approach to affect employee behaviour are clear; employees are likely to prefer a ‘light touch’ to coercion, and often this will work more effectively, particularly if they buy-into the interventions. Organisations are ultimately the sum of their individuals and so organisational behaviour change requires individual behaviour change. Whether you want employees to come back to the office or motivate them to work remotely, considering the potential for behavioural science to achieve this target behaviour may be wise.

Read our latest blog

Behavioural segmentation can be used to develop a deeper understanding of a market, telling us not just who our target market is but also what they do, need, and value. This allows us to develop and market new products and services to actively appeal to the segments with the greatest likelihood of adopting them. Our latest blog details the processes involved in conducting behavioural segmentation, and provides examples of its benefit from our own work on a new Mobility as a Service (MaaS) app and increasing adoption of smart metres.

Sign up now: Lessons learnt from 50+ experiments in the energy and water sector

On Thursday 3rd October, our Managing Director, Jesper ?kesson , and Senior Behavioural Scientist, Ondrej Kacha , will present the second webinar of our Behavioural Insights in Practice series. This webinar will focus on our work in the water and energy sectors, the challenges we’ve faced and the lessons we’ve learnt.?

You can sign up now via the link below; we look forward to seeing you there!

Thank you for reading this month’s newsletter! We hope you found it interesting! As always, if you would like to chat to us or have ideas for us to work together, don’t hesitate to get in touch!