Are you asking the right questions to change behaviours?
By definition, a behaviour change brief suggests that current behaviours aren’t delivering the outcomes an organisation wants. Often, an organisation will engage a creative agency to help them develop a creative campaign to change behaviours to deliver a particular outcome.
By this point, the organisation has usually done plenty of research; they know how their people think about working there, they will have data about the outcomes they want (and perhaps don’t yet have). But there is rarely any data about why employees are behaving in the ways they are now, or what’s stopping them from adopting new behaviours. “What’s stopping you?” is a question that is rarely asked.
Or, there is a far more useful family of questions which explores the attitudes, norms and perceived behavioural control which then inform someone’s intention to behave in a certain way. This is the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB; Ajzen, 1991); an incredibly robust theory which can explain an apparent gap between attitudes and behaviours. Or, in other words, why someone can have all the right attitudes to doing something, but then fail to behave in the expected way. Like dieting, stopping smoking, or recycling.
The utility of the theory inside organisations is its precision. The theory increases in its ability to predict behaviour with increasing precision of the target behaviour, the context, and the timeframe. If you want to find out “what’s stopping you?” you ask a series of questions about the target behaviour that are unlike questions you would typically ask of employees. For instance, to explore norms you’d ask whether someone’s colleagues would approve of them behaving in this way (what’s termed an injunctive norm) and whether most of their colleagues behave in this way (a descriptive norm). To explore perceived behavioural control, you’d ask how easy, or hard, someone would find it to behave in a certain way.
The answers to these questions exploring attitudes, norms and perceived behavioural control give valuable insight into what is stopping people from adopting new behaviours, and, consequently, how these can be addressed.
The psychologist who developed the theory, Icek Ajzen, has a website dedicated to the theory, including step-by-step guides to constructing a questionnaire.
In my current studies for a master’s in psychology, I’m partnering with a large organisation to explore recycling behaviours at their London HQ using a TPB approach. To date, the organisation has relied on education and signage to improve rates of recycling which has not delivered the expected improvements. In our research, we are exploring how self-identity, organisational commitment, and attitudes, norms and perceived behavioural control influence employees’ intentions to recycle at work, and so better understand the gap between recycling intention and behaviour. And further, gain an insight into interventions which can improve recycling rates.
If you want to change employee behaviour, are you asking the right questions to understand what is stopping people from behaving in the way you’d like? By asking different questions about attitudes, norms and perceived behavioural control you can generate brilliant insight for shaping your next steps.
At Blackbridge Communications, I lead the employee engagement practice, where we use creativity, our social media expertise and applied psychology to create effective employee communications that move people to do things differently.
If you’ve got a behaviour change challenge, get in touch and let’s have a conversation about how asking different questions could help you achieve the change you need.