Four ways to use people’s own biases to change behaviour and increase performance

What is a behaviour and how does it happen?

Behaviour = Motivation + Ability + Prompt 

According to the Fogg Behavior Model, a behaviour happens when motivation, ability and prompt come together at the same moment. Motivators and prompts are well documented tools that BI WORLDWIDE helps clients to deploy, but what about ability? 

The Fogg Behavioural Model says that even with the best, most relevant motivators and communications delivered at the right time to prompt action, failure is inevitable if ability is lacking. 

All is not lost! Part of any good incentive programme design is looking at how to make a behaviour achievable and how able a participant is to get there. 

“Simplicity is a function of a person’s scarcest resources when you prompt a behavior”

B.J. Fogg

What Fogg, along with many other behavioural scientists, acknowledges here is that people look for shortcuts when making decisions, and their biases heavily influence those decisions. This also tells us that ‘simple’ is a fluid thing and what makes a task simple for one person won’t necessarily work for the next and that ‘simple’ may even change for an individual from one day to the next. 

Affecting a person’s ability has a substantial risk of failure if not well considered and planned; it can also be expensive. For example, training is the most high-effort, high-risk way to attempt to affect a person’s ability – you need to be really sure it’s needed.  In its State of Workplace Training Study, Axonify found 43% who received training found it to be ineffective. In an era of widening skills gaps, the need to train has never been greater. Plus, new tech that promises to make workers more productive — if they only had the time to learn to use it — compounds the problem. Employers are feeling the squeeze from all sides and looking for solutions.

What if we could create ‘simple’? 

What if we could create our own heuristics to ensure we have a range of tactics to influence ability? 

In BI WORLDWIDE’s approach to incentive programme design, we first want to ask the people you want to influence the question – how is easy is the task to do? What are your barriers to success? We’re then able to intelligently design your solution, including techniques like gamification to simplify a task, knowledge tests to build confidence, and tools that make tasks seem quicker and easier using the human brain’s own biases.

Our approach to creating an effective incentive programme

1. Availability bias: Breaking the task down and surrounding the individual with the information that they need will ensure it springs to mind and they feel equipped to achieve the task at hand.

2. Framing and loss aversion: The correct framing, including the benefits of a new process vs the complexity of an old one, and pointing out what could happen if a customer isn’t sold to in this way, is a powerful perspective for change.

3. Pose an easier question: Using data, we can ascertain what your target audience’s world is like on a day-to-day basis. What are their challenges? Ask them to achieve something that feels simple by changing the question or the way it’s asked. 

4.Tailored advantage: When deploying an incentive programme, show your audience they have an advantage by positioning the referred effort of others. Idiosyncratic fit is a key to incentive adoption and belief that a reward can be achieved for the required behaviour.

How we can help!

The first step to changing behaviour is a conversation. If you’re looking for an effective incentive programme that suits your employees and is inline with your business goals, we’d love to help