Reinforcing habits for a customer-driven culture

It’s often said that culture eats strategy for breakfast, a lesson many companies have learned the hard way.? You won’t be successful implementing your strategy if you don’t pay attention to culture, which is one of the prime causes of the high failure rate for “transformation” programs.? However, most change efforts tend to focus on building awareness of the need for change and shifting mindsets, without paying enough attention to how to change behavior across the organization.? As you focus on reinforcing a more customer-driven strategy and culture, activating the right behaviors at scale is critical, as your employee interactions with customers play a key role in evoking emotions that reinforce your brand, taken together with all the other physical and digital experiences customers have with your brand.

Atomic Habits, by James Clear, is a must read for anyone serious about understanding and shaping human behavior, which is at the core of both customer and employee experience.? While the book has great insights that apply at a personal level, it also provides actionable insights for business leaders looking to drive value by paying attention to experience management and culture together.? In the book, Clear refers to how his own work builds on the ideas of pioneers in behavioral economics and psychology, including Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.? These two thought leaders have had a big influence on my own thinking, along with others for whom you can find my book reviews here.

The core thesis of Atomic Habits is that making a steady stream of smaller scale improvements adds up to a dramatic impact on your desired outcomes.? The book lays out a simple and easy to apply framework for how habits form and how you can proactively shape them.? It then lays out four ways you can make it easier and more sustainable to drive a higher level of performance through attention to habits.

Clear defines a habit as “a routine or behavior that is performed regularly – and, in many cases, automatically.”? Habits form when you observe a cue, establish a craving for how a behavior makes you feel, engage in the behavior regularly, and receive a reward close in time to practicing the behavior.? Clear emphasizes the importance of systems thinking, and that your trajectory is more important than your immediate results.? Because your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits, you will appear to make little progress until you cross a tipping point, and the compounding effect kicks in to drive accelerated impact.? By focusing on your system of change rather than break-fix efforts addressing symptoms only, you will generate much larger and more sustainable impact.

Let’s dive into each of the four laws to make habit building most effective, which is how the book is organized.

Law 1. Make it Obvious

Just as every culture has both good and bad behaviors that impact the organization’s effectiveness, every individual has a mix of good and bad habits that they have built up over time.? To build new habits, it helps to start with an understanding of your current habits.? This is particularly helpful not only to decide what to amplify vs. change, but also because you can stack habits to make it easier to adopt new ones by layering them on top of existing ones using the same cues to trigger behaviors.

Most change efforts focus on mindsets, which is helpful to create motivation, but not sufficient to drive impact without changes to behavior.? Ever hear the saying that it’s easier to act your way into new mindsets, which means that people will shift their mindsets to be consistent with their behaviors?? Conversely, if you preach changes to mindsets that are not congruent with how people behave, there will be a lot of resistance to change.? As a starting point, it helps to create more specificity of intention about what behaviors you are looking to change and when you will do them, e.g., when X happens, instead of doing Y, I will do Z.? Specificity of intention reinforces commitment.? Practicing a behavior increases evidence that it is working, which creates a virtuous cycle to transition from conscious competence to unconscious competence as your habits become something you do unconsciously without using up as much mental energy.? For more on how this works, check out my podcast episode with Chris Taylor , CEO of ACTIONABLE , here (episode #7)

The first law focuses on how to make it as easy as possible to respond to cues in the environment, and to know what behavior to do when you experience the cue.? Clear includes a great quote from Carl Jung: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”? Clear builds on this thinking and others that followed Jung in shaping out understanding of the importance of unconscious thought and emotion on human behavior, emphasizing the role of habits to reduce the amount of effort it takes to do things.

The principle “make it obvious” manifests itself in several ways in marketing, where a lot of attention is paid to creating solutions that tap into an insight about what emotions we feel at key moments that matter.? Brands design displays in the store, better apps, or better content online to make it easier for customers to get the message and respond to a simple call to action.? Customer loyalty is about habit building, where customers engage in behavior regularly because of the emotions that are evoked by their behavior, reinforcing meaning and memory in a virtuous cycle that fuels brand growth.? The same principles apply for habit building within organizations.? Making it obvious is the first step on your employee journey to a more customer-driven culture, making it easy for your employees to plan for when to engage in specific behaviors, and to spot the cues for when to practice those behaviors in the moment.

Law 2. Make it Attractive

We engage in habits because of how they make us feel.? The habit building loop is reinforced through the release of neurochemicals like dopamine, called the dopamine spike, which provides the craving we feel in anticipation of a behavior.? Dopamine (or other neurochemicals) isn’t just about pleasure.? It’s involved in a broad set of neurological processes, such as motivation, learning, and memory.? The habit building circuit is effective because of the way cravings build up in response to a cue, which reinforces our motivation to act.? It is the craving that drives our behavior.? If the craving and the resulting reward don’t provide more benefit than the effort required to engage in the behavior, the habit loop will weaken.

One way to make it more attractive to engage in behavior is called temptation bundling, combining a new behavior with an existing behavior.? By linking the new desired behavior to an existing cue and reward cycle, you’ll increase adoption.? Another way to increase behavior adoption by making it more attractive is to tap into the social influence effects within an organization.? Within any organization there are internal social influencers that others draw energy from and who have magnified impact on adoption of cultural behaviors.? You can take proactive steps to tap into their energy and showcase the behaviors for which you’re trying to achieve broader adoption.? People will copy the behaviors of others within their culture, because of the shared emotions they feel when practicing the behaviors.? Reinforcing community within your organization around your cultural behaviors will strengthen your shared identity and peoples’ desire to act to close the gap between their current and desired state.

Law 3. Make it Easy

Many companies have embraced human centered design and experience management as disciplines to improve their customer experience.? Many also apply these principles to employee experience, focusing on how to improve employee engagement and an emotional connection along key moments that matter from hire to retire.? What most companies miss, however, is the opportunity to fuse CX and EX and truly tap into the energy within their culture.? This is where the third law really comes into play and why habit building is so essential to the CX & Culture Connection (the name of both my own book and podcast).?

Clear shares great insights and pragmatic tips on how you can practice environment design to make it easier to engage in desired behaviors.? Just as you can reduce friction along the customer journey, you can make it easier for employees to engage in behaviors that reinforce a more customer-driven culture.? That includes behaviors that have a direct impact on customers through how your frontline employees show up with customers at key moments that matter along the customer journey.? It also includes indirect behaviors where your employees contribute to a better CX through improvements to product design, operations, technology, and other things that touch customers even if the employee is not present themselves physically or virtually as part of the experience in that specific moment.

The way your leaders show up with employees provides a safe space for them to practice behaviors, coaching on specific things to do, and encouragement to stick with it (see my article here on leadership experience, and how it impacts customer, and employee experiences, as well as others on how CX and culture go together).? Your leaders and managers can help shape habits, working with their teams to start smaller and scale up towards your end state vision.? They can reinforce commitment devices to get people to act in ways that are consistent with commitments they make.? They can also encourage everyone to contribute to environment design to identify and implement workflow solutions that automate the cues for behaviors and make it easier for employees to engage in them.? Internal ease of business contributes to customer ease of doing business.

Law 4. Make it Satisfying

The first three laws make it more likely behaviors will be performed the first time.? The fourth law makes it more likely they will be repeated. ?This is essential because our brains are wired for immediate returns rather than delayed returns.? In marketing and customer loyalty you can build some of the reward directly into the usage experience.? This is possible too for culture-change efforts, given the natural human drives to bond and learn and the pride we feel in others’ approval and ideally in our own actions, wanting them to be consistent with our identity.? To drive greater organizational effectiveness and reinforce the alignment of strategy and culture, it is essential to be more proactive in making it satisfying to engage in your cultural behaviors.

There are three things you can do to achieve this at scale.? First, you can focus on ways to get your employees to make commitments to practice specific behaviors and pair them with “accountability partners” that make them more likely to stick to those commitments.? Second, you can measure how often employees engage in the desired behaviors and provide feedback to them on their progress.? Habit tracking keeps us honest, as most people have a biased view of their own behavior.? Moreover, when we can see our progress, we are more motivated to keep going.? Seeing your progress reinforces your identity, acting your way into new mindsets.? Third, you can link behavior adoption to outcomes, making it more likely that leaders and managers will stay invested in environment design to keep the flywheel spinning.

Where do most efforts fall short and how can companies fix this?? Many companies do encourage employees to make commitments, but often this is not as actionable because it is at too high a level, for example signing their commitment to the mission, vision, and values, rather than making commitments to practice specific behaviors at specific moments in time.? Or people make commitments without using accountability partners to reinforce commitment and consistency.? The greatest missed opportunity, however, has to do with measurement.? Most companies give up trying to measure behavior adoption, thinking it is too hard to do or would require excessive surveying of the organization.? In fact, you can make simple adjustments to your relationship and transactional surveys with customers to identify which emotions are present in the customer journey and what behaviors employees engage in to evoke those emotions.? You can then link the improvement in your emotion and behavior scores to business outcomes through your system of metrics.? This is a topic I address regularly on my podcast, The CX & Culture Connection, and about which I’ll be publishing more in the future.?

Getting from Good to Great

Clear closes the book with some pragmatic advice on how to make your efforts pay off.? He reminds us of the Goldilocks Rule, that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks puts them right on the edge of their current abilities.?? Playing on a great team creates flow where everyone lifts everyone up to a higher level.? We can also focus our own efforts, practicing habits and shaping them so that we make 1% improvements regularly.? The cumulative effects are enormous over time.

In closing the book, Clear again calls out the importance of systems thinking.? Bad habits repeat themselves and are hard to get rid of not because you don’t want to change, but because you have the wrong system of change.? Without reflection and self-awareness of the system and how it is working, you can’t see if you are making improvement and will be less effective in choosing which of the four laws to focus on to improve the system.

I hope that this book review sparks some great ideas for you!? I’m looking forward to your feedback and to continuing the conversation on my podcast directly with guests and with the audience within the LinkedIn groups in which I post one minute video reels from the podcast.? Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you’d ever like to discuss this or other books I’ve reviewed!