Do the posters, emails, newsletters, vignettes and training really change employee behaviour? Why do people still do seemingly stupid things despite all the awareness campaigns and 100% on-time completion of compliance training? How can we make people just do the right things?
I believe these are some of the questions that often keep compliance professionals awake at night. To minimize the risk of people doing things they should not do or not doing things they should, compliance professionals must understand what drives behaviour.
“Compliance is a function of human behaviour and understanding what drives human behaviour is fundamental to promoting a compliant culture.”
According to BJ Fogg, founder of the Stanford University Behavior Design Lab, behaviour happens when three things occur at the same time: Motivation, Ability, and a Prompt to do the behaviour. This is represented as B=MAP.
To illustrate this, let us consider the simple act of answering your mobile phone. You might sit with the phone in your hand (able to answer), hear the phone ring (prompted to answer), and willing to talk to the person (motivated to pick) before answering the phone.
MOTIVATION
According to BJ Fogg, Motivation is the urge or desire to do something. Motivation may be reflective(involving self-conscious planning and evaluation) or automatic(processes involving wants and desires, impulses and reflex responses). The examples of behavioural interventions that can be adopted to influence motivation include education, persuasion, incentivisation and coercion. A person’s motivation to perform a behaviour ranges from being low to high.
ABILITY
There must be the ‘ability’ to perform the behaviour. Ability can either be physical or psychological. The examples of behavioural interventions that can be adopted to influence ability include education and training. A person’s ability varies from being easy to do to being something hard to do.
PROMPT
A prompt is best described as a call-to-action. A prompt is a trigger that prompts a change in behaviour. Triggers are very important because, “without an appropriate trigger, the behaviour will not occur even if both motivation and ability are high. Examples of prompts include reminders, notifications e.t.c
The action line within the Fogg model depicts the relationships between ability, motivation, and prompts. Prompts that happen above the action line will succeed every time. Prompts occurring below the action line will fail because there is not sufficient motivation to perform the behaviour, because the action is too difficult to do, or both.
Now, let us use a practical example to simplify this concept. If you want a person to record all gifts given or collected in compliance with the company’s anti-bribery and corruption policy, you need to look at three things;
- Does the person have the motivation to report a gift received?
- Does the person have the ability to report the gift?
- Is the person being prompted to report a gift at a time that coincides with the person’s motivation and ability being at the right levels?
The table below shows the Fogg Behaviour Model components for this example:
Using the above model, compliance professionals can identify what needs to change for the target behaviour to happen and subsequently identify the relevant intervention and implementation options.
*Please note that the views expressed are mine and do not represent the views of any entity.
** Pictures Source- Nir Eyal
