How can we stop a behavior from happening?
When building a service, product, or process, or even revising workplace practices, think about making them - Abnormal, Fraught, Aversive, and Reflective - especially if your goal is to discourage certain behaviors.
Let me illustrate with an example - following on from yesterday's post:
The Company
A Large Organization undergoing internal Transformation:
The Scenario
The organization is plagued with an excessive number of meetings, draining employee productivity and morale.
A transformation team, which could include new leadership or a dedicated change management team, is brought in to streamline operations and foster a more efficient work culture.
They identify the excessive meetings as a critical pain point and decide to tackle this issue head-on.
How can they leverage behavioral science and use a framework like
AFAR?
Abnormal (A): Make the behavior (in this case, scheduling and attending excessive meetings) appear out of the ordinary or not a standard practice.
-Encourage a culture shift where frequent meetings are seen as unusual or counterproductive.
-Highlight alternative communication and productivity strategies that don't rely on meetings, setting a new norm that values efficiency and focused work.
Fraught (F): Make the behavior more difficult or challenging to perform by creating obstacles or barriers.
-Introduce policies or environmental changes that make scheduling meetings more cumbersome, such as requiring a clear agenda and objectives for each meeting, limiting room availability, or setting strict criteria for when a meeting is necessary.
-Aversive (A): Associate the behavior with negative outcomes or unpleasant experiences.
-Emphasize the negative aspects of too many meetings, such as reduced time for focused work, increased stress, or decreased overall productivity.
-Use feedback or data to show the impact of excessive meetings on team performance and job satisfaction.
Reflective (R): Encourage a thoughtful reconsideration or evaluation of the behavior, disrupting automatic patterns.
-Implement tools or policies that prompt individuals to think carefully about the necessity and purpose of each meeting.
-Encourage practices like regular reviews of meeting effectiveness, feedback sessions on meeting culture, and training on efficient communication methods that could replace some meetings.
Of course, these strategies can only work if you know what drivers you are designing for, but this framework is great when you are working on your solutions and want to ensure you have a checklist to validate them.
We help many organizations with challenges like these and we ensure a systematic and evidence-based approach to designing solutions.
(NEAR-AFAR is created by Susan Michie and Robert West from UCL)