Nudging in the workplace: How to help your employees make better decisions.
Written by @Niki Sotiriou
“Don’t believe everything you think” is one of my favorite phrases. Have you ever caught yourself wondering how your emotions or beliefs affect your decisions at work, or doubting if you behaved rationally in a situation where you needed to make a quick judgment?
During the last decade, the Nudge Theory has become quite popular and its application has caught the attention of big organizations around the world, across different functions. Relying on the assumption that people systematically behave in an irrational way when they need to make choices, it proposes some ways to counteract our inherent cognitive restrictions.
In this article, we are going to dive into the idea of nudging and propose some easy interventions that you can apply in your organization. I hope to be able to showcase that by incorporating scientific insights into the day-to-day life at work, you will be able to help your employees make better decisions.
Are we as rational as we believe?
As humans, we have the tendency to believe that most of the time we are able to size up all the costs and benefits of each decision that we need to make. But the reality is, that most of the time we need to rely on what we call ‘’the automatic part of the brain’’, the one that acts fast and instinctively, in order to come up with quick decisions.
To give you some examples, we act on ‘auto-pilot’ most of the time when we need to survive physically or psychologically: let’s say that you are driving to your office and need to react fast to a pedestrian who crosses the street or that you are standing in front of an angry colleague because of a mistake that you made at work. When you are in these situations you do not start to analyze how you’ll react, right? You act instinctively and you are able to do so, because of the mental shortcuts or ‘’bypasses’’ of the automatic part of the brain.
To better understand how these mental bypasses work, let’s take for example the ‘’affect heuristic’’. This is a shortcut that we use when we rely mostly on our emotions rather than concrete information when we need to make a judgment. In order to understand the positive implications that this might have in our lives, let’s think of fear: Fear is an emotion that has helped us survive from environmental threats for many years through the evolutionary process.
On the other hand, our emotions might also have negative implications in our lives: Imagine that you are a Hiring Manager and you are interviewing someone on a day that you are in a really bad mood. Your mood might affect your ability to build rapport with a high-caliber candidate and you might end up disqualifying them because you ‘’didn’t feel the chemistry’’ on that day.
This is just an indicative example that shows the potential negative implications of these mental shortcuts that often lead us to biases. To some degree (which varies based on different factors like our past experiences and background), we are all being affected by them, ending up making non optimal choices.
One can find more than one hundred biases in the literature. For example the “optimism bias’’, refers to the fact that people usually tend to underestimate the chances of failure. In the workplace, this bias results in the planning fallacy, which describes our tendency to fail while managing project timelines and to overlook project risks. Or the ‘’status quo bias’’, that refers to people’s tendency to stick with their current situations and resist change.
Choice architecture: a cure to bias-driven behaviors?
When we apply any kind of interventions in order to prevent this bias-driven behavior among people, we act like “choice architects”: we alter the environment in which people make choices. The nudges can be considered as “positive reinforcements” and “indirect suggestions” with the power to shift people’s decisions into preferable directions and include different kinds of interventions like creating default rules, restructuring complex choices to more simplified ones or creating incentives.
Below you can find some easy interventions that you can do in your workplace in order to facilitate unconscious thinking among employees and help them be more productive:
Decrease the default duration of meetings: In the (almost) post-covid area, the duration and frequency of daily virtual meetings among employees is still very high and as a result employees often complain about feeling overwhelmed and unproductive. This is highly related to what we call ‘’information bias’’, which is our tendency to believe that the more information we have, the better we can do our work. As a result, we end up spending long hours in virtual meeting rooms sharing information, instead of actually doing the work.
Introduce pre-work to reinforce independent thinking in meetings: Because of people’s tendency to think and behave in ways that conform with others (what we call “herd mentality’’), individuals might be reluctant to speak up their minds in a meeting and might end up relying on an idea of a single person. By asking people to come prepared with ideas, you motivate them to share their unique ideas with the team.
Better planning (e.g Project Management Tools): Better planning can help us stop our brain from constantly reminding us about all the unfinished work. This is important because of the Zeignarik effect, which describes our tendency to focus our energy on uncompleted tasks until the moment they are completed. By splitting up our workload into smaller parts based on priority and forcing ourselves to finish each task before moving on, we’re maximizing our cognitive capacity and becoming more efficient.
Digital notifications to avoid working long hours: There are many digital nudges that can be used in order to increase employees’ work-life balance. For example in our team, we use notifications in our internal comms platform that remind us every evening that it is time to wrap up and go for a walk, even when working from home.
What’s next?
Something important to mention before we wrap things up, is that often discussions about the cognitive biases tend to have a negative spin. When you catch yourself complaining about other people’s biases, try to remember that all these mechanisms are a result of the evolution process that made us capable of surviving psychologically and physically in our environment. We all have our own biases. The tricky part is to acknowledge them.
By implementing the right interventions, we will be able to facilitate the unconscious thinking of our employees and customers. But before we start the implementation, we should first educate ourselves and the people around us on how our brain actually works. In this way, we will not only be able to start building from scratch the right decision-making environments, where people will be able to dominate on their inherent cognitive restrictions, but we will also help them start noticing them. And as we all know, realization is the first step to change.
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