CHAPTER 30
CONCLUSION
Lessons from a Sexologist
In July 2020, I was scrolling through my Twitter feed looking for new ideas when I came across a tweet that grabbed my attention.1 The first line read as follows:
If you want to know how we get people to comply with wearing face masks, ask a sexologist.
Obviously, the word “sexologist” made the post incredibly salient. I didn't know any sexologists, so I wanted to learn what advice they might be able to give. But I also loved that this was someone drawing compliance lessons from one field and applying them in another. If a sexologist thought there were some parallels, I wanted to know more. The second line of the tweet read:
It's not our first rodeo when it comes to convincing people they should wear a barrier for protection from a deadly virus.
Suddenly it became clear where the thread was going; insights from stopping the spread of HIV could provide lessons on how to stop the spread of COVID. Genius! I read on.
You can't shame, guilt or judge people into compliance. Does not work.
Wow! This was interesting. You don't have to be a sexologist to see sense in that statement. And then:
Help people to learn the communication skills needed to talk to others they encounter who don't want to wear one.
Music to my ears! It was pure “think about how people are likely to behave rather than how we'd like them to behave!” The thread continued with eight other equally insightful and behaviourally brilliant tweets. So, I did exactly what you'd expect. I got in touch with the person who'd written the tweets, Jill McDevitt, and invited her onto my Human Risk podcast to tell me more. She said yes, and we spent an hour exploring it together.2
Borrow Good Ideas
It's the perfect illustration of the main lesson I want to leave you with at the end of the book. When faced with compliance challenges, we tend to look at what we've done before or what other people in our field are doing. Yet, as Jill has illustrated, sometimes we can find inspiration in a completely unrelated area.
We can often find solutions in the most unusual places by simply reframing our compliance problems as behavioural challenges. Lots of the examples I've provided in this book of how BeSci can help influence human decision‐making are in a marketing context. That's a discipline where they're looking to maximise sales of a product or service, so they make sure that they test all of their ideas thoroughly to get the best possible answer before they release their intervention into the wild.
In a compliance context, we often don't have that luxury. Not only are we not set up to do lots of testing, but we don't have the time. Surprisingly, this can actually be an advantage, because it means we can move more quickly. Unlike marketing, we're not seeking to maximise outcomes; if we can make our population more likely to do something by making small changes, that's great. If changing the wording in an email, for example, can increase compliance rates from 60% to 70%, that's a positive. There might have been an option to get that number up to 77%, but we'd have had to do many experiments to find that out. I contend that if we can make things better, then we should. A small win is better than no win.
Compliance in the Wild
As we end our journey, I hope the examples I've shared inspire you to think differently about how we can influence our employees. One of the most exciting things is looking all around you for ideas. Everywhere you look, you can find examples of compliance requirements imposed on us; some successfully, some not. That might be when you board a bus, go to a supermarket, cross the road, enter an office building, or log onto a website. All have the potential to inspire solutions to compliance challenges. Or, indeed, provide reminders of what not to do.
As a final example, here's a longer case study involving a client of mine, who took inspiration from “compliance in the wild” to a whole new level. I think she's come up with a really innovative solution. As with all the ideas in the book, my aim is not for you to slavishly copy them. Though feel free to borrow any aspects that you find appealing. Instead, the idea is to highlight where we came up with our ideas and how we transformed them into practical solutions.
How Frequent Flyer Programmes, Doctors Appointments, and Customer Service Emails Helped Humanize Rules
I'll call my client Jenny. She's Head of Compliance at a large multinational, and she was having problems getting people to complete their mandatory training on time. In common with the rest of their industry, the company needs their employees to complete a certain number of training modules each year.
We began by scoping out the problem they were facing. Jenny explained that their approach to this was as follows:
Jenny explained that a significant number of people either did it in the final 24 hours before the deadline or missed it entirely. That, she explained, led to the idea of emailing their line manager so that they could also put pressure on the individual. This entire process had created additional admin for the training team and meant that many employees needed to be disciplined because they'd missed the deadline. While the line manager email had improved things, it hadn't worked as well as expected.
When we discussed the problem – using HUMANS as a basis for analysis – we realised there were a few challenges from a behavioural perspective. Six things immediately struck us as problematic, based on our anecdotal data.
1. Email
The first thing we looked at was the email. When Jenny had first described it to me, she'd used the word “invite”, but I thought that was just her way of describing it. It turned out that they were sending out “invitations” to mandatory training! It wasn't the first time I'd come across that formulation. As I explained to Jenny, if the training is mandatory, inviting people to attend is disingenuous; it's either an invitation, which the recipient can refuse, or a mandatory requirement, which they can't. It cannot be both. They were potentially irritating the recipients before they'd even read the email!
Then there was the content of the email. The training was described in very technical terms and referenced the rule it covered. Not only did it not sound very interesting, but there was nothing in the description that made it sound at all relevant to the average employee. That, I figured, probably wasn't helping matters.
2. Timing
Then we looked at the timing. I asked Jenny how they decided when to send the email out. The answer was that they used automated scheduling software, which, it transpired, could easily mean that the system would send out emails on Friday afternoons. Not great, as it meant they were effectively sending emails at a point that the software thought was convenient, not necessarily at a convenient time for the people taking it. Since it wasn't evident to recipients that the timing was being scheduled by software – remember WYSIATI! – the email could easily lead recipients to believe that Jenny's team had deliberately chosen the timing. That was fine if it landed at an appropriate time but terrible if it didn't.
3. Deadline
We then discussed the deadline. On the one hand, 30 days sounds like a reasonable time to do a training course. But 30 days doesn't give anyone a particular sense of urgency either. It could engender a propensity to “kick the can down the road”, particularly if the subject was something that didn't interest them. On the flip side, not all 30‐day periods are the same. A 30‐day period that begins on 24th December, just before people go off on their Christmas holidays, is not the same as 30 days that start on 24th January. Jenny confirmed that the system had no blocks on it, meaning it was perfectly possible emails could go out offering “anti‐social” 30‐day periods.
4. Reminder Emails
Then there were the reminder emails. While they were ostensibly designed to be helpful, they contained an implicit presumption that someone who completes the training as soon as they receive the email “invitation” is somehow more compliant than someone who does it in the final hour before the deadline. Both are equally compliant, yet someone adopting the latter strategy receives unsolicited emails cajoling them. The line manager's emails before the deadline also seemed quite an aggressive policy. Thirty days, after all, means 30 days!
5. Messenger
We also looked at “the messenger”. In other words, the mailbox from which the email came. While it shouldn't matter who sends an email, we know it does. The email came from an anonymous training mailbox. Might that, I wondered, have an impact?
6. Target Audience
Finally, the target audience. We looked at who was being sent the training. It turned out that for administrative reasons – aka the convenience of those organising the training – the training team had decided that every employee would take the training, even those for whom it wasn't relevant. Better, it was thought, safe than sorry.
The Solution
Having done a workshop to explore these areas, here's how Jenny and her team went about solving the problem.
The first thing they did was to rewrite the email to be more customer‐friendly. Jenny and her colleagues looked at letters and emails they'd received in their personal lives from organisations that needed them to do things and looked for customer‐friendly wording they either liked or didn't like. The former would help inspire, the latter were things to avoid.
They reviewed utility company requests for meter readings, letters from doctors' surgeries asking them to make medical appointments, and even one from a tax authority requesting payment. They found customer‐friendly wording they liked, and while they didn't copy it verbatim, they took inspiration from things they found engaging. It's the very opposite of WPYO. They removed the word “invitation”, changed the email's wording to explain what the training would cover – not from a theoretical perspective, but a practical “what's in it for me” angle from the recipient's perspective – and made an effort to make it sound more salient.
Then came my absolute favourite part of this whole exercise. The new email informing recipients of the need to do the training offered them a simple deal. They could have 30 days to do the training, but they could have one day's credit for every two days they did so ahead of the deadline. With certain restrictions, the email recipient could then use that credit to give them more time to complete a future training course within the following 12 months.
Two things inspired this. The first was that many loyalty schemes – airlines, for example – have huge unused points balances that people have accrued but never get around to using. Perhaps people would respond similarly when it came to training credits. Why not bank them just in case they ever needed them? Plus, people like collecting things, so why not give them something to collect? By ensuring the credits expired, we would avoid people being able to roll training over into perpetuity! The best part of this idea is that the credits cost absolutely nothing. You're creating something the employees might value out of thin air.
The second inspiration was a text message Jenny had received from her doctor inviting her to make an appointment at a time of her choosing. This inspired the concept of working with employees who would need to do the training to find a time that suited them. The invitation nudged them to make this during the following 21 days to ensure there was some slack but gave them the entire 30 days if needed. Even if they received the email at an inopportune time, they would be “invited” – for once, a good use of the term! – to pick a slot in their diary they felt they would be free to do the training. It would then schedule a diary appointment for them at their chosen time.
The system then only sent the person doing the training a single reminder email the day before the slot they had chosen. It would only send chaser emails if the recipient failed to do the training at the time they had committed to do it. If people cancelled the training, they'd be sent a reminder and a link to rebook.
They also decided that the email invite would be sent from someone the recipient would know. Since we already knew they could identify the recipient's line manager, the invitation was sent out from them by, but not from, the automated system. The line manager chaser emails were then only sent if the individual missed the deadline.
The last change was probably the most significant. My client limited the training to those for whom it was felt to be genuinely necessary, documenting the rationale behind their choice in case a regulator asked. And they added one further option. Employees who received it could apply for a dispensation if they could provide a good reason why it might not be relevant to them. Interestingly, very few did.
There are three lessons to learn from this. The first is that we can take inspiration from anywhere. As you'll have noted, the ideas came from contexts that were nothing to do with compliance.
The second is that while, in an ideal world, we'd have run experiments to test each change, that's not always possible in the real world. When faced with a compliance challenge, you often don't have the luxury of testing things before implementing them.
The third lesson is to know what you're trying to achieve with particular interventions and monitor them to ensure they're doing what you intend. Since we were removing impediments and things that were unpopular with the old approach, it was unlikely – though not impossible – that the overall package of changes would make things worse. Fortunately, it made them much better.
And, Finally
I will finish the book with the answers to two of the questions people commonly ask me when I talk about humanizing rules.
“So, How Would You Have Prevented the Oscars Envelope Error?”
My suggestion would be to remove as many distractions as possible, ignore the context, and look at what the task involves. Partners don't usually do administrative tasks like handing out envelopes. So, let them stick to the red‐carpet stuff and stay well away from envelope management.
Ideally, you'd find a junior staff member, but the responsibility might overawe them, so I'd go for a mid‐ranking person. They'll remember what it's like to do administrative tasks and bring some experience. The final criterion is you want someone who detests the movies, so regardless of what happens, their focus will be on the job.
“Since You Don't Like the Word ‘Compliance’, What Would You Call the Function Instead?”
My initial reaction is “anything but Compliance”! Though there isn't really an obvious alternative. “Adherence”, a term used by the medical profession to describe the act of following a prescribed course of action, is one alternative. As is using words like “Ethics” or “Integrity”. But I think a smarter way to approach this is to recognise that there is one huge benefit to the “Compliance” brand. It sets really low expectations that anything you do to humanize the function will seem much more impressive!
Thank you for reading the book. Do get in touch to share how you've used the ideas in it. You'll find me on LinkedIn and Twitter if you search for “Human Risk”.