The Behavioural Insights Team recently released a report on using their EAST framework for HSE. Here, I want to highlight some relevant insights and contribute to the discussion on what business and human rights can learn from health and safety from a behavioural perspective.
What insights can we leverage from behaviour change in health and safety?
Insight: Make it Easy.
How can we make it as easy and seamless as possible for people to perform the desired behaviour?
Example: The authors highlight the challenge of protecting workers from noisy machinery that can cause hearing loss[1]. One approach to this challenge might be to train workers on the importance of wearing ear plugs when operating the machinery. Another approach might be to incentivise wearing them. Another might be to penalise not wearing them. Instead of changing the behaviour of the workers, changing the context and environment can be more effective. In this example, they fit noise insulating hoods on the machinery. This is a quick, relatively inexpensive and less onerous intervention that changes the context, not the individual behaviour.
Application and relevance: How is this approach already being used to change behaviours that impact human rights within companies? And how might we build on this for more effect? I recently heard a great example from an apparel company that similarly intervened to change the environment, not the person. In this case, when a purchasing/sourcing manager is placing an order with a supplier it is impossible for them to change the minimum unit price in the software. This means that the manager cannot squeeze the price paid to suppliers, which could contribute to workers not being adequately compensated or compromising their working conditions. It’s predicated on the assumption that suppliers pass this benefit on to the workers of course, so it’s not foolproof, but it’s an enabling factor for rights-respecting behaviour. This is an instructive technique because it’s a simple software fix that overcomes the challenges and resource intensity of training approaches and withstands personnel dynamics that might impede behaviour change (e.g. competing incentives, staff turnover etc.).
Insight: Remove (or introduce) hassle, obstacles and “friction”.
How can we reduce hassle and obstacles to make desired behaviours easier to do? Or, conversely, how can we introduce “friction” to make undesirable behaviours harder?
Example: The report shares an example of how removing one click in an online form – removing friction - increased the number of people completing the form on time by 20%[2]. Conversely, there are situations where we might want to make an undesirable behaviour harder to perform. For example, making paracetamol packs smaller reduced poisoning by 43%, by making it harder to access a large quantity of pills. It is estimated that this led to 765 fewer deaths between 1998 and 2009[3].
Application and relevance: Where would adding or removing friction help to prevent adverse human rights impacts? One example of how friction is already deployed is found in how technology and telecommunications companies introduced procedural steps – or hurdles - for governments seeking user data*. Another example from Nextdoor shows how they mitigated the platform being used for racial profiling. Nextdoor is a neighbourhood-based social network and users were flagging “suspicious” activity by Black and Latino residents. Nextdoor redesigned their app so that when users posted mentioning race, a checklist appeared and requested more information before reporting the incident. This “friction” encourages users to slow down their thinking and reflect on whether they were genuinely seeing suspicious activity or acting on bias. This reduced racial profiling incidents by 75%[4].
Insight: Make it Attractive.
How can we attract attention (e.g. through design, personalisation or aesthetics) to desired behaviours?
Example: In HSE, this might involve wearing high-visibility vests or using floor markings to show where equipment should be. Measures to encourage social distancing during COVID-19 have focused on attracting visual attention through signs and markings that make the desired behaviour clear (e.g. stand here while waiting, keep 2 metres distance from other people).
Application and relevance: Jonathan Drimmer, formerly of Barrick Gold, describes how he would attract attention to the status of different business units’ human rights due diligence activities through a traffic light system. This company-wide tool was transparent internally and units that were amber or red quickly sought to be in the green zone. The visual signal attracted attention and action. More generally, human rights materials don’t have a reputation for being particularly “attractive”, often due to budgetary or resource constraints or because we hope the message itself is compelling enough.
Drawing attention to social distancing measures through markings on the ground
Insight: Use social norms and influence.
How can we leverage the behaviour of others (e.g. our peers or networks) or make commitments to others to make doing the desired behaviour more socially embedded?
Example: The report highlights two relevant dynamics in relation to how social influences and networks shape culture and behaviours within organisations. The first looks at social norms and how sharing descriptive norms (information about how others are behaving) reduced accident rates in firms in Chile. A large-scale randomised control trial gave information to the target company comparing their accident rates to the average accident rate in the industry. This comparison sparked action and significantly reduced the accident rate for firms who were above the industry average[7]. More broadly, social influence is one of the most well-studied and implemented techniques to shape behaviour and there are extensive ways that the field could use these insights, as I’ve shared previously and will continue to explore in the future.
The second explores the role of involving employees in decision-making around HSE. The UK Health and Safety Executive found that involving employees in identifying safety hazards and determining control measures correlates with good safety performance[8]. This makes intuitive sense because we are more likely to be invested in initiatives which we feel a sense of ownership of.
Application and relevance: The use of social norms to drive rights-respecting behaviours will not be necessarily new to practitioners. Particularly as it’s so well known that bad behaviour is the product of social environments that can create toxic cultures where cutting corners, exploitation and a narrow focus on profits are the norm. Serious companies would do well to highlight good behaviour and publicly punish bad behaviour in order to communicate social norms internally. Building on the UK HSE example, much research has shown that involving colleagues in the design of interventions, as many astute human rights and responsible business conduct professionals do, leads to greater uptake of the intended behaviour.
Insight: Make it timely.
How can we prompt the target at the moment when they are most receptive to trigger the desired behaviour?
Example: The report authors give the example of an intervention to encourage users to speak up in Kenyan minibuses about dangerous driving as they witness it[9]. Timeliness is a critical factor in supporting behaviour change efforts and ideally you want to “nudge” the desired behaviour at, or as close as possible to, the moment of action.
Application and relevance: What’s the most pertinent moment to remind someone of expected behaviours? For buyers in fast fashion companies this might be a pop-up message if they amend an existing order with a supplier. The pop-up might remind them that changing the order without a corresponding change in the shipment date will place pressure on the supplier and make it challenging for them to meet its responsibilities towards workers in terms of pay, overtime etc. In another of Jonathan Drimmer’s examples he shares how he used timeliness to remind security guards of the company’s expectations of how they interact with the community around the mine-site just before they went on patrol. The company developed informational tray-inserts in the canteen that guards use before their shift. This is a radically different approach to annual training efforts as it ensures that the reminder is timely and salient at, or as close to, the time that the behaviour needs to occur so that it is front of mind.
What are the implications for business and human rights?
The report highlights a number of insights and areas that are relevant for those working in business and human rights and trying to drive responsible business behaviours within companies. It raises several interesting questions for our work, including:
How can we deploy EAST for other responsible business issues?
Are we making it as easy as possible for people to do the desired behaviour?
Are we making our behavioural prompts as attention-grabbing and attractive as possible?
How can we build on using social processes and influences to shape behaviour?
Are we intervening at the most opportune times when people are receptive?
I’m keen to hear how you are using these principles and insights in your work.
* It is also important to note that technology companies, and business more broadly, also introduce friction or “sludge” to make certain things harder to do, often actions that are in consumers’ best interests. Examples include making privacy settings difficult to access on social media platforms or putting up barriers to cancelling subscriptions.
[1] Behavioural Insights Team (2019), ‘EAST for Health and Safety: Applying behavioural insights to make workplaces safer‘, p8
[2] Ibid. p9
[3] Ibid. p9
[4] Quartz (2020), ‘The push to redefine “good design” amid the Black Lives Matter movement’
[5] Behavioural Insights Team (2019), ‘EAST for Health and Safety: Applying behavioural insights to make workplaces safer‘, p12
[6] Ibid. p12
[7] Ibid.p15
[8] Ibid. p17
[9] Ibid. p19