Anyone working in the responsible business space is in the business of behaviour change. This is particularly the case for people within business trying to anticipate and respond to human rights risks. They are seeking to influence, and change the behaviour of, their senior leaders, their counterparts and colleagues in different regions, and their suppliers and business partners. Examples of behaviours that practitioners are trying to change include ensuring that:
Business development teams flag concerns about customer-end use.
Workers report grievances using worker voice apps and speak-up. Mechanisms.
Procurement managers provide suppliers with accurate production plans.
Local human rights ambassadors monitor and escalate changing conflict dynamics.
Mine site management regularly meet with local communities, stakeholders and NGOs.
Suppliers accurately disclose human rights risks in their business.
But it’s comparatively rare to put behaviour at the centre of responding to human rights risks, and there aren’t (to my knowledge) any tailored tools to support responsible business practitioners to think behaviourally about what they want to achieve.
Spotting this need and this gap, I’ve been developing a Behaviour Change Tool to support organisations to:
Map what behaviours need to change to ensure responsible business practices;
Prioritise specific behaviours to focus on;
Diagnose what’s getting in the way; and
Suggest strategies and approaches to effectively change behaviour.
Novartis’s global human rights team participated in the first pilot of the tool to understand what needs to change to manage human rights risks in conflict and high-risk areas. Here, I’ll reflect on lessons from this pilot to improve change efforts within organisations.
Lesson #1: Identifying specific behaviours gets to more tailored solutions.
It was challenging to identify and map what behaviours need to change to realise our objectives and behavioural outcome. It’s hard to disentangle what we need people to do with potential solutions or interventions – for example, attending training or joining a community of practice can be a behaviour (something you want people to do) but it’s also a solution (something you want people to do because you think it will lead to something else). Successfully disentangling behaviours and solutions leads to more tailored, and (presumably) more effective ways forward. Doing so moves beyond catch-all solutions such as training or awareness-raising. It moved us towards more fit-for-purpose solutions that ensures colleagues are equipped to do very precise things differently.
Lesson #2: Try to change your own behaviour before changing others’.
It was (comparatively) easy to generate many ideas about what colleagues need to do differently. It would be (comparatively) harder to get colleagues to do them in reality. Changing behaviour is not easy. And this is compounded by the fact that we are often asking busy people, with many demands on their time, to do more. Research has shown we are prone to think in terms of what we can add versus subtract[1]. This insight led us to think more about what the human rights team could take on, based on the observation that it’s (comparatively) easier to change our own behaviour than other peoples’.
Image credit: Opening scenes from the Lego Batman Movie.
Lesson #3: There’s not enough evidence on how to effectively drive change.
Human rights teams have important strategic questions about how best to influence certain behaviours. Unfortunately, presently there is little evidence to guide decision-making. Through the process, we identified two particularly prescient strategic research questions where more evidence is needed:
1.) How can organisations attract employees to participate in human rights initiatives?
Will employees be more inclined to participate if we emphasise how participating will help them do their job better, help organisations to avoid risk, or because it’s the right thing to do? We could give and justify compelling reasons to take one approach or another, but this would just be guesswork in the absence of testing those messages and collecting data on what best leads to action. It’s common to see the ‘throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks’ approach to attracting people to engage in these initiatives – giving people long lists of reasons why participating will be beneficial - and there’s evidence to suggest this is not effective[2]. Research in diversity and inclusion shows that the moral case for action outperforms the business case[3], but we do not know what is most effective for human rights initiatives.
2.) Does senior leader participation in human rights initiatives help or hinder employees’ engagement in those initiatives?
On the one hand it might drive attendance and senior leaders’ participation may signal the importance of participating and organisational commitment. On the other hand, it may harm the quality of conversation and make it less likely that people will speak up and raise questions, issues, and concerns, particularly in certain cultural contexts. More research and understanding here would be helpful to effectively drive quality participation.
Through the process we got to greater levels of detail and specification about what needs to change to manage human rights risks in conflict and high-risk areas. The level of granularity we achieved appeared to generate more focused and tailored strategies to address the challenge. The process also generated more opportunities and areas for evidence-based research.
I’ll continue to share lessons on the other pilots. And get in touch if you’re interested in learning more about the Behaviour Change Tool and/or using it in your organisation.
About the tool and process
The Behaviour Change Tool is a four-step process to understand what behaviours need to change. Better Business Behaviour and the Novartis Global Human Rights Team worked together to move through each step of the process with the aim of managing human rights risks in conflict and high-risk areas.
The tool helps organisations to:
Define a behavioural outcome for what this work seeks to achieve;
Map behaviours that would help to achieve our outcome;
Specify target behaviour(s) to be precise about who needs to do what, when, where and with whom;
Diagnose behaviours to understand why they are/are not occurring.
The process used the COM-B model of behaviour to identify whether colleagues in conflict and high-risk areas have the capability (C), opportunity (O) and motivation M) to perform the target behaviour (B). By exploring the presence (or absence) of these foundations for behaviour change, we created a heat map which identified priority focus areas - the heat map image below is a hypothetical example for illustrative purposes only. This led to a series of recommendations for how to encourage and enable the target behaviour using insights from behavioural science.
[1] Klotz, L. (2021). Subtract: The untapped science of less. Flatiron Books.
[2] Sivanathan, N. and Kakkar, H. (2018). Less is more it's a scientific fact. London Business School Review, 2018
[3] Georgeac, O. and Rattan, A. (2022). Stop making the business case for diversity. Harvard Business Review.