Can You Alter Employee Behavior in Your Workplace? Consider These 6 Powerful Strategies!

Corporate training’s main goal is to alter employee behavior at work, and behavioral change can only come about through genuine learning. Nevertheless, learning is an active process rather than a one-time activity, and altering employee behavior calls for more than just surface-level learning goals and a single training session. Below are a few methods you can use to influence employee behavior at work.

What is the correlation between organizational learning and employee behavior?

The behavior of its employees determines the effectiveness and efficiency of any firm. Employee behavior constitutes organizational values, according to the adage, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Instruction is useless if employee behavior doesn’t change. It leads to a loss of days consumed in both face-to-face and online classes and eLearning programs. Both those who receive the education and those who create, design, and give it are wasting their time.

The purpose of learning and development (L&D) departments should go beyond providing training and include efforts to change how employees behave at work. Identifying the habits influencing important company KPIs and outcomes is one method to start this procedure. Educational methods aiming to alter employee behavior at work are centered on educational objectives that align with those behavioral changes.

To correlate planned behaviors with actual behaviors and pinpoint areas that require improvement, L&D professionals can collaborate with important key stakeholders and specialists in the field. They can start creating programs encouraging the right behaviors after they have spotted them.

The best course of action to change employee behavior can then be determined in collaboration with all stakeholders by L&D specialists acting as performance advisors. It could be as straightforward as a work process delivered to each individual’s email or as sophisticated as a hybrid curriculum that combines live seminars and workshops, communications from the top management, and microlearning prompts and notifications of the intended change in behavior.

We know that high-performing workers frequently exhibit habits influencing important business KPIs, strategies, and philosophies. High-potential professionals can become high-performing workers using some training methods that alter employee workplace behavior. But, fostering an atmosphere that encourages good behaviors enhances the productivity of all personnel, even those with a low level of performance, and not only with exceptional possibilities.

Which are the primary learning strategies to promote good employee behavior?

Beginning with the reason is essential in any effort to enhance employee performance in the organization. Workers are more open to learning and putting new practices, processes, and creative approaches to achieving organizational goals into practice when they recognize why their conduct must shift.

Training is useless if employee behavior doesn’t change. There are numerous tactics that result in behavior change, such as:

• An environment for academic achievement includes microlearning, professional education, prompts, practice, assessment, and practical training by default.
• Microlearning and smartphone applications inside the performance and education ecosystem establish a social learning area that motivates good behavior.
• Mobile learning has the potential to enhance behavior modification and extend educational opportunities, particularly for younger employees from different generations. Mobile applications, in general, can be utilized for game-based learning experiences in addition to proactively prompt and alert staff members of desired outcomes.
• Hybrid learning programs that include mentoring and coaching provide an additional prod to alter behavior in a productive learning environment.
• Employees that participate in clustered education, meaning acquiring knowledge in small communities, are given more responsibility as they work to change their behavior. Cohort trainees can act as peer mentors by checking in with one another, giving assistance, and offering guidance.

Any training course should aim to influence employee behavior, and the practices and tactics described here will hasten that transformation.

Educational campaigns

A tactic of advertising is a campaign. This relies on regularly disseminating brief informational bursts at regular times. It’s ideal for the contemporary learner and perfect for microlearning. You can keep learners engaged in the training campaign considerably longer by breaking up larger content into more manageable portions. You can continually add fresh training materials and keep people interested.

They have a routine. Learning campaigns use the patterned release strategy to create change. Establishing a connection with your students by delivering information on a fixed schedule can help them become accustomed to it.

They’re ideal for portable devices. We scan our smartphones every 12 minutes on average. Our cell phones typically come out of our pockets only to rest on our nightstands. They are, therefore, the ideal instrument for interacting with your employees.

They serve to further understanding. According to the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, we lose 50% of the information we learn within an hour, 70% within a week, and 90% within a month. What can we, therefore, do to combat the forgetting curve? The effectiveness of information reinforcement can be used. The pace of deterioration decreases each time we refresh our knowledge. Through a procedure known as spaced learning, one can reinforce knowledge. This ensures that the brain develops the learning prior to it being forgotten by incorporating regular intervals between learning sessions.

Practical training

Employees participate in exercises, role-plays, and research studies as part of experiential education, which fosters a culture that supports behavior modification and leads to a change in employee attitude. Individuals can practice new habits in a secure environment using practical training, pinpoint areas in which they require more practice, get advice, and then practice repeatedly.

Remarks and prods

Any attempt to alter employee behavior needs feedback. Lacking criticism, employees are unable to recognize when their actions are inappropriate. Inside the feedback system, leaders, managers, change executives, training groups, and mentors all have a crucial role to play.

Employees ought to be given a chance to follow through, inquire about, and attempt once more after obtaining feedback. Iterative employees have a greater chance to succeed in changing their behavior in the desired ways.

Again, small prods throughout the workflow can be valuable in addition to active evaluation and mentoring. Workers can be reminded of important information through cleverly positioned micro-learning sessions, which can assist them in changing employee habits. The skills that were taught in professional education can also be refreshed by quick movies and infographics distributed via emails or an organizational social networking site.

Social learning

The link between information and behavioral interventions is social learning. It serves as one of the foundational elements of employee engagement, alongside gamification and personalization. In the second half of the century, renowned researcher Albert Bandura created the social learning hypothesis — and today, it has become one of the favorite corporate training strategies. He suggested that people might learn from each other through watching, mimicry, and modeling.

This notion is influencing education and growth. A useful strategy for both knowledge transfer and the generation of new information within your company is to establish a free flow of information. Everyone benefits when employees gather to explore subjects and gain from one another. There’s more, though! The more often your trainees debate a subject, the more probable it is that the subject will stick in their minds. Your staff members will benefit from the constant repetition as they battle the forgetting curve.

So, do you wish to implement a social learning-based behavior change strategy? Consider utilizing a social learning application that enables users to post their learnings to a newsfeed. This functionality enables you to build communities where staff members can talk about their training. With the help of this tool, you can set up areas where your team can talk about the current learning campaign.

Even better, get your experts in the field to assist you and frequently disseminate useful knowledge. Anyone having a problem can seek assistance in a society that values information exchange. This implies that your employees might receive the assistance they need right when they require it.

Modeling

The most successful way to alter employee behavior at work is by using executive sponsors or advocates as role models. Follow-up communications from managers can assist change conventions, reinforce positive activities, and lessen undesirable behaviors when used in conjunction with microlearning to remind staff of behavioral expectations.

All of these efforts result in new conduct that reconfigures the cognitive processes, building fresh neural connections that result in more advantageous behaviors. After a habit evolves into a behavioral trait, the behavior permeates all of an employee’s daily behaviors.

Gamification

The application of gameplay mechanics to settings that are not gaming-related is known as gamification. This development method is rooted in research and is used to drive engagement. Serotonin and dopamine, two feel-good neurotransmitters, are reported to be released in the nervous system by these mechanisms.

Such feel-good substances encourage your employees to return for the instruction simply out of enjoyment. It makes sense why gamification serves as such a potent tool for motivating trainees. The more often workers return, the more education they finish, and the lengthier the knowledge stays in their heads.

It takes time to modify behavior. This is why you must ensure that your students frequently use your learning management system. Make sure the students are interested if you want them to return. Make careful to include as much enjoyment as you can when using gamification. Look into every aspect of your instruction and question yourself, “How can I start making this more enjoyable for my employees?” Here are a few methods for doing just that.

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Badges

Use a learning platform that helps you to award your talented learners with badges anytime they succeed. Badges make learners happy regardless of whether they’re achieved through video viewing or by logging into the system multiple times. In addition to making employees feel valued, badges also spark their attention. When students know that there are awards available, they may search for more.

Points

You can assign points to any activity on the top gamified training platforms. It will keep people vested and appeal to everyone’s innate sense of competition.

Leaderboards

If a leaderboard is absent from a game-based learning system, then what use is it? You can determine a game’s success by looking at its scoreboard in a majority of mobile games. The competitive nature we all possess is tapped into by leaderboards, which are a powerful engagement feature that encourages participants to continue playing.

Quizzes pitting learners against each other is another way to spur competition. By utilizing reinforcement, you can use tests to influence employee behavior modification. Employees will notice that the topics are replayed frequently as they compete with various team members. The repetition is what will cause the behavior to alter.

Streaks

Repeating actions in order to receive rewards is the concept of streaks. The ideal illustration could be a stamped card at a cafe that encourages frequent visits in exchange for a free espresso. The same type of incentive is available to you through streaks on a teaching tool.

A streak could be a highly successful strategy to alter employee behavior according to your purpose. They motivate students to return and finish more coursework. This aids in the establishment of neurotransmitters in the learner’s mind, altering the behavior of the learner.

Game schemas

Did you ever have the desire to create your own video games when you were younger? With the aid of game-based writing tools, you can finally fulfill that long-held goal. Platform games, kart racers, and other classic arcades can be made for your staff.

Furthermore, game templates that are specifically relevant to the instruction in consideration are possible. You can influence your students’ behavior by using these techniques. On the other hand, smartphone training platforms have emerged as the clear front-runner for behavior modification methods since mobile usage has already surpassed computer usage.

Wrapping it up

There are numerous approaches you can take to influence behavior modification. Our favorites are gamification, social learning, and learning campaigns. We adore them since we’ve used them repeatedly and are confident in their effectiveness. They work really well. There is obviously a ton of alternative strategies you might try. Find a strategy that works for both you and your business.

Ad: PlayAblo’s Enterprise-Grade Micro-Learning platform is built for millennial learners. Micro-Learning, assessments, and gamification features ensure learning outcome measurement and sustained engagement.
Find out more and request a custom demo!