Most Managers struggle to get their staff to change or adopt new behaviours. If you stop and analyse what they are doing to change behaviour you will usually find that they are missing the key ingredients. Take a look at the steps below and start your journey:
1: Awareness: Unfortunately, building awareness does not change behaviour. It won’t do any harm but it usually only results in a 2% to 3% change in behaviour. Examples of building awareness include writing a policy or hanging a sign. These are generally ineffective when done in isolation. 2: Clarifying the Task: If you add a clarification of the behaviours required to carry out the task, you can raise the change in behaviour from 10% to 15%.
3: Endorsement from management: If a Manager speaks directly with staff, and explains why he or she really wants them to do these actions, then you can get a 40% to 50% change in behaviour.
However, if you add the key ingredients of: 4: Feedback & Reinforcement to the mix, then you can get a whopping 70% to 100% change in behaviour. Both of these should be consistently regular until the new behaviours become the norm. Positive reinforcement through the use of praise, reward etc will motivate and accelerate the change. The game changing benefits of Feedback and Reinforcement has been known for over 50 years but as shown above, awareness alone doesn’t make people do it or act upon it.