This is the second article in our series looking at the COM-B model of behaviour change, and applying it to the changes in behaviour encouraged by the Mindful Business Charter. The articles build on each other sequentially, following the approach of the model itself, and so if you missed the first article we would recommend you take a few minutes to read it here.
In the first article we talked about the difference between a behaviour and an outcome, and of the need to be specific about the behaviour you want to work on — going for a walk first thing in the morning three days a week as opposed to exercising more, for example. In an MBC context, one of the bullet points in the Charter talks about respecting people’s right to take annual leave which is quite vague and there might be a number of possible more specific behaviours you might identify such as:
In this article we will continue to focus on how to choose the specific behaviours you want to work on, because that is the basis on which everything else depends and so it is crucial to get it right — if you are looking to apply the model in your own organisation we would encourage you to reflect that level of focus in your approach.
It is worth keeping in mind that people and organisations can only cope with so much change in one go. Sustainable progress is most likely to be achieved through focussing on a small number of changes at any one time. Our experience talking to organisations that have made meaningful change with the Charter is that taking one aspect of the Charter, focussing on a few behaviours, letting them bed in, reviewing how it has gone, and celebrating the positive impact before thinking about the next areas of focus, is the most helpful approach.
This is obviously doubly important in high pressure environments where people have very limited time. You need to respect that if you are to retain buy in. While you don’t necessarily need to go with the pace of the slowest to change, you can’t expect everyone to move with the speed of the enthusiastic changemaker. All organisations have their own cadence and you will need to judge the right speed to adopt, taking account also of the broader context, and reacting to it. Understandably, for example, you might need to pause in the face of a global pandemic which is forcing overnight changes to pretty much every aspect of how we work.
Keep in mind that we are looking to unpick mindsets and behaviours that have been built up over many years. It is going to take time, hard work and sustained enthusiasm and resource to get to somewhere close to where we would like to be.
Take soundings
It is probably obvious, but if you want to engage people with behavioural change it would be helpful if it was something that they cared about, and that they would like to see change. This is particularly so at the start of your MBC journey — once you are further down the road, and people have seen the benefit of engaging, they may be more willing to trust in the process and go with the flow. Whether it is through a survey, workshops or other mechanisms, try to get a sense of what are the major sources of stress. They may be behaviours specifically mentioned in the Charter, but be ready to be flexible — MBC exists to reduce the unnecessary sources of stress and much of what is in the Charter are examples of potential issues. It may be that if you ask your people what are their main sources of stress they would like to see addressed they come up with new issues.
Once you have an idea of the sorts of things people want to see addressed, you can begin to whittle that list down into a small number of behaviours that you are going to target initially.
Three factors to keep in mind
The COM-B model suggests using three factors to decide which behaviour(s) to select:
Let’s consider an example
Applying the COM-B Model to a hypothetical organisation
Throughout this series of articles we are going to use Example Org to illustrate different points. They have around 500 employees in multiple offices in the UK, and a small office in the US. They joined MBC a year ago. While there has been a generally good reception to the Charter with lots of support for its principles as a concept, there are some areas where more work could be done. Anika and Tom, the MBC Leads, are looking at ways they can encourage people to adopt more of the Charter into their working practices.
From internal staff surveys, as well as feedback gathered in workshops and elsewhere, there are three issues they have in mind which they consider in turn on the following bases:
They want to be more specific about the behaviour they want to change. They recognise that there are of course times when it is necessary for people to be emailing and collaborating outside of normal working hours. MBC, after all, is not about not working hard, or slacking, but about reducing unnecessary stressors. As a result, the behaviour they settle upon that they want to reduce is the unnecessary sending of emails outside of normal working hours, emails that are not time critical.
They also define what they mean as normal working hours as being 8.30am to 6.30pm. This is helpful to give people greater clarity as to the behaviour in question, it allows for some variation in people’s working patterns and it also provides a basis for measurement which we will come to in a later article.
What’s next
Having identified the behaviour they want to change, the next stage will be to think about how do they encourage the change to happen. That involves looking at the three core elements of the COM-B model, Capability, Opportunity and Motivation, and how to assess those in order to create the best environment for the desired Behaviour to change. We will look at those in more detail in the next article.
The COM-B model was developed and devised by Susan Michie, Maartje van Stralen, and Robert West in 2011 at University College London. We thank all at UCL who have worked on this behaviour change model, and especially those who have assisted us in learning about it, and discussing its implementation within the work the MBC does.
To find out more about the MBC and the work we do, visit our website or contact us directly — richard@mindfulbusinesscharter.com or charlotte@mindfulbusinesscharter.com
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