This is the fifth and last in our series of articles exploring the COM-B model of behaviour change and applying it to the Mindful Business Charter. The model is sequential, as are our articles, and so if you haven’t seen the previous one we’d recommend taking the time to read them — Article One, Article Two, Article Three and Article Four.
During these articles we have followed Anika and Tom of Example Org as they have considered which behaviour they want to change (reducing unnecessary emails being sent out of normal working hours) and then the intervention types that they will employ to achieve their aim, (Environmental Restructuring, Incentivising and Modelling) from the intervention types we explored in the last article. They now need to bring it all together and start putting it all into action.
Throughout their planning they have involved the IT team who have come up with various suggestions of tweaks to the IT system to prompt the desired behaviour change, as well as a programme of training to help people understand how to use them. This has really engaged the IT team who are now coming up with a whole range of other ideas to think about for the future. They are already trialling in their own team an automatic prompt when they log in first thing in the morning that asks them to identify and diarise when they are going to take a full 45 minute break for lunch, as well as a series of automatic prompts prior to any scheduled holiday prompting them to think about handing over projects while they are away and what they need to do to plan for that.
Anika and Tom, of course, are encouraged by this positive engagement, but they recognise they need to progress at a speed that engages the whole organisation rather than trying to rush people into doing too much too soon based on the enthusiasm of the early adopters.
They know they want to have some data, partly so that they can measure the success of their interventions and partly because they want to encourage some friendly competition between teams. Again they engage the help of the IT team.
They want to be able to measure progress and so they ask IT to record the average number of emails sent outside of their defined normal working hours over a specific period to gain a benchmark. They have a sense that there are some micro cultures in specific teams where this is more of an issue than in others and so they ask IT to break the data down at team and office level (they decide against going down to an individual level as they fear naming and shaming people). This data will also be crucial when they come to producing their league tables of which teams are doing best, both in absolute terms and in terms of percentage improvement, for which there will be some small awards to incentivise further.
They decide that they will run this first intervention over a three month period — long enough to take account of ebbs and flows in activity levels but not so long that people lose interest. Averaging out the number of out of hours emails across their 500 staff they find that in an average week each person, on average, is sending 20 emails out of hours. They target an ambitious 40% reduction in this over the three month period, which means each person sending eight fewer out of hours emails each week, or reducing by a little under two each working day. Broken down like that it feels manageable, indeed almost too easy, but they decide against being overly ambitious at this early stage — better to take some easy wins their CEO, Alison, suggests.
They decide that they will publish progress on a monthly basis so teams can see how they are doing and to promote the sense of friendly rivalry that they hope will be a useful incentive.
The CEO, Alison, uses a townhall presentation to flag to people what is planned and to give her backing and insight as described in our last article. Anika and Tom then go round each team in turn to meet with them, explain what is happening, answer questions and listen to any concerns. Although they do come across some negative voices they are more surprised by the degree of positivity they encounter. The US folk raise some issues relating to time difference but the IT team, now even more enthusiastic than Anika and Tom, are able quickly to come up with workarounds.
During the team workshops they come up with the idea of having a champion in each team who will be empowered to call out perceived poor behaviours. They have no shortage of volunteers and then run a brief workshop with those champions to help them think about how best to call things out without causing offence.
Finally, Anika and Tom reflect that a reduction of emails sent unnecessarily outside of normal working hours is not an end in itself — the purpose is to reduce the stress that people feel. As a result, they speak to HR about the quarterly pulse engagement survey that is done. HR agree to including some questions in that survey:
They will redo that survey at the end of the three month period to assess the impact.
And so they launch and wait to see what happens. There is a lot of initial chatter about the initiative and, through the data IT is collating, Anika and Tom can see an immediate impact in terms of the volume of emails outside of normal working hours. The reduction plateaued a little after the first three weeks but there was another marked improvement after the first monthly league table was produced, confirming their belief that team rivalry would be a helpful incentive.
There are some anomalies where progress seems to be reversed which they then investigate. In one team there were a number of people on holiday or off sick at the same time which meant those at work were having to cover for them and work longer hours. In another team they learned “on the grapevine” that the head of the team had spoken out to the team against the initiative and so they spoke to him one to one with the CEO, Alison, and were able to persuade him to give his support for the trial period at least.
At the end of three month period they collated the results and shared them, with the awards they had promised. Of course, there was a huge amount of positive change, they smashed their targets and the pulse engagement survey showed an overwhelmingly positive improvement in the responses! At the same time data on clients leads, sales and project delivery, as well as client satisfaction, all improved dramatically. We would say that wouldn’t we? But if we go back to our second article and what we said about spillover, it is going to be useful to keep an eye on other data to see whether there are positive or negative impacts as a result of your desired behaviour change.
Armed with the success of this first initiative, with some useful learning gained along the way, they meet with the champions from the teams and agree on a couple of new behaviours upon which to focus. They also decide to repeat the questions they had in the pulse engagement survey, as well as have IT repeat the data analysis, after six months to make sure the changed behaviour has stuck, and they are pleased to find that for most of the teams there has been a continuing, if more steady, improvement.
Not every behavioural change will need to have the depth of planning that Anika and Tom went through, and, of course, as you get used to the approach, and how change works in your organisation, you can move more quickly. It is worth repeating though that careful planning is often the key to a successful outcome. And not every behavioural change initiative will be a roaring success. But by planning and through discussion and review, it is more likely you will understand why things didn’t work out as you’d hoped, and be able to factor that in next time around.
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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