What really drives employees to change their behavior?

Sally wants to get promoted into management. You think she has potential. But she’s often late to work, and you tell her she’ll have to start getting in at 9 a.m. sharp to be considered for a promotion. Now, a month later, she’s still coming in late.

Chris, another employee, isn’t respecting deadlines. In the past, executive summary reports were due on the fifth of every month. Now they’re due on the second, but Chris misses the new deadline every time. Your boss is losing patience. “I need those numbers to run this business,” he says. “Get Chris to deliver them on time!”

If these were your employees, how would you get them to change their behavior?

Would you try a carrot? Would you, for example, praise Sally if she goes an entire month without being late?

Or would you use a stick? Would you read Chris the riot act every time his report is late?

Well, carrots and sticks might work. But there’s a good chance they won’t.

Two drivers

When people think about changing behavior, they often start by focusing on motivation. The right combination of rewards, threats and punishments, they believe, will boost motivation and achieve the desired behavior. If Sally really wants that promotion, she’ll get herself into work on time. And, if you make Chris’s life miserable, he’ll stop procrastinating.

But motivation is one of only two drivers of behavior change. And it’s often the less effective of the two.

To see why, let’s look at the work of professor B.J. Fogg, a researcher at Stanford University. Fogg developed a simple model that shows what needs to happen for behavior to change.

The Fogg Behavior Model posits two drivers of change — motivation and ability — and a third element, which it calls the “trigger.” That’s an action that could stimulate behavior change — for example, when Sally declares her ambition to be a manager, or when you threaten Chris with dire consequences if he can’t deliver his reports on time.

The Fogg Model addresses the question: “When will such triggers be effective, and when won’t they?”

If the right combination of motivation and ability is in place a trigger will cause behavior change. If this combination is lacking, it won’t.

Ability vs. motivation

It’s easy to see that for managers who want to spur behavior change in employees, it’s an issue of increasing their motivation, increasing their ability, or both.

But many managers make the mistake of focusing only on motivation. That’s the default option because we all tend to see motivation as something that’s easily influenced, and ability as something that’s only changeable over time with a lot of hard work and training.

It’s often exactly the opposite, according to Fogg’s research. In many cases, it’s easier for managers to influence ability — not necessarily by making people more “able,” but by making the desired behavior easier to achieve.

Take Sally, for example. You’d think her motivation to succeed in management would probably be enough to get her to work on time. But she has a special challenge. She’s got children and has to drive them to school every morning in heavy traffic. Some days she simply can’t make it to the office by 9 a.m.

Sally has an “ability” problem, not a motivation problem. So your best bet as a manager may be to make it easier for Sally not to be late. Perhaps it’s as simple as shifting her work hours so she can come in at 9:30 and leave at 5:30.

And what about Chris, the employee whose executive reports are late? It turns out he gets the data for his operational report on the same day the executive report is due. He misses the deadline because he needs to complete the far more complex operational report before the simplified executive report.

Here too, the problem isn’t motivation. It’s ability. And, again, the solution might be as simple as going to the IT director and saying, “Can you run Chris’s data report a day or two earlier?”

Sometimes you need to increase both motivation and ability. For example, it makes sense to give sales reps incentives to pursue a new market. But incentives won’t  succeed if the reps don’t understand the market, struggle to connect with prospects, and become frustrated. Pulling both the motivational lever – with, for example, a bonus plan — and the ability lever – for example, by giving them more insights into the new market – might deliver the sustained behavior change you want.

The key questions

That brings us to the two questions you should ask before you try to change someone’s behavior: Is this person sufficiently motivated to change? And does he or she have the ability to change?

Most people are motivated to do the right thing. And there’s often no downside to making the right thing easier to do.

Will making change easier get the results you want? Not necessarily. But the Fogg model suggests that when trying to change behavior, you need to consider both motivation and ability. If you don’t, you might end up uselessly expending energy trying to increase motivation. And you might be missing opportunities to increase ability – creating easy wins for yourself and your employees.

This blog entry is adapted from the Rapid Learning module “Changing behavior: Why rewards and punishment often aren’t enough.” If you’re a Rapid Learning customer, you can watch the video here. If you’re not, but would like to see this video (or any of our other programs), request a demo and we’ll get you access.

The blog post and Rapid Learning video module are based on the following research paper: Fogg, B.J. (2009) A behavior model for persuasive design. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Persuasive Technology, 40, 1-7.