How to think like a psychologist and ‘design in’ communication effectiveness
When I started working with psychologists five years ago, I had worked in creative communication agencies for 20 years, with 13 of those in employee communications.
And great creative and effective communications have always used behavioural science and psychology (in hindsight). But we landed there by happy accident. It wasn’t something we consciously considered and built in from the first conversation.
There are three principles I take from my psychology studies and experience working with behavioural scientists which I apply to every employee engagement and communication brief I work on: clarity, ‘what’s stopping you?’, and get into the weeds.
In practice, this means you switch focus from ‘what do we want to say?’ to ‘what do we want people to do. differently?’ Think about that behaviour, in detail. When will they will do what you want them to do? How will it feel for them? What might stop them or create the right conditions? Focusing on the messy humanity – the people and behaviour at the core of every brief – is a psychology-led approach in a nutshell.
This approach and the questions you’ll raise can be challenging for stakeholders. It can stop a brief in its tracks because it starts conversations about precisely what we want to achieve, for who, how and why – and whether that is realistic, within that specific organisation, or for those specific people. It’s a good conversation, but it can be difficult. Particularly if stakeholders have assumed a creative campaign, or a particular course of action. By focusing on effectiveness, or the potential for reduced spend (very often, behavioural science will lead you to low cost, pragmatic solutions, rather than all singing, all dancing creative), can help this conversation.
1. Clarity
What precisely do you want people to do differently? What’s the target behaviour you want? For communication effectiveness, you need to define the specific behaviour, the timeframe for the behaviour, and the context.
For example to help us achieve the goal to: “Improve customer satisfaction”.
We may define a target behaviour of: “Fix the customer’s problem in the first conversation.”
This specific behaviour clearly identifies our target audience – people speaking to customers – and then it becomes clear that we need to get some intel, and speak to our customer service agents to find out…
2. What stopping you?
If we know that we want customer problems fixed in the first conversation – ask your customer service agents about their experiences. When can they manage to fix problems in one conversation that? When can’t they? What process, or system means they need to escalate to someone else, or send the customer off to a different department? What’s the expectation for owning and solving a customer’s problem? What is the reality? Are there incentives for getting a customer off the phone – problem solved or not? For example, average call handling times, or calls per hour?
Dig in and get under the skin of it. A model like COM-B (capability, opportunity and motivation) is a useful way of being methodical in exploring all of the opportunities for and barriers to a specific behaviour, and for shaping the questions you’ll ask.
At this point that you may need to tweak, or change, your target behaviour, because in large organisations, it takes time, resources and stakeholder wrangling to change systems and processes. And pragmatism is one of the things I love the most in the world. So, when the system won’t bend to support the capability, opportunity or motivation to enact your target behaviour – change the target behaviour. You’ll still make progress towards your goal.
3. Get into the weeds
As in life – the details matter. Wonderfully messy humanity, where people are impatient, busy, overwhelmed, and absolutely not listening to you. Add to this that a large chunk of our daily behaviours (up to 70%) are habits.
So, get into the weeds. Think about the context for your messaging – when does it land? How? Where? Can someone act on it right away? Or are you expecting them to hold a digital communication in their mind until a point in the future when they are in the right environment to enact the behaviour? Who sends the message? Because that matters. And what language are you using? There are loads of ways that psychology can help us use language in the right way that will encourage people to respond to our communications – for example (and this is just a few of known behavioural science effects) social proof, reciprocity, reactance, scarcity effect, loss aversion, and the endowment effect. Small changes to copy can have significant impact on effectiveness.
In short…
Get clarity on your specific target behaviour, the people you want to do that behaviour, what may be stopping them and how you can create the right environment for the behaviour. Then get into the detail of your communications.
If it sounds simple, that’s because it is (sort of). Having a laser focus on genuine communication effectiveness is deeply rewarding. It starts very different conversations with stakeholders and reduces unwanted and ineffective noise for employees.