Change and the COM-B model (4) — Interventions
This is the fourth of our series of articles exploring the COM-B model of behaviour change and applying it to the Mindful Business Charter. The model is sequential, as are our articles, and so if you haven’t seen the previous one we’d recommend taking the time to read them. — Article One, Article Two and Article Three.
The earlier stages of a COM-B analysis involve identifying the behaviour you want to change and making a “diagnosis” to understand which of the Capability, Opportunity and Motivation factors are the biggest inhibitors to the proposed change. In our previous article we mentioned that in our example scenario, Tom and Anika had diagnosed that the Opportunity and Motivation areas of employee behaviour were the major challenges requiring focus. This stage is where we get to work out what to do about it — how are we going to remove the barriers and enable that change in behaviour.
The COM-B model identifies nine intervention types that can effect change — Education, Persuasion, Incentivisation, Coercion, Training, Enablement, Modelling, Environmental Restructuring and Restrictions. We will take a look at each of these and what they all mean in more detail.
Education — Simply put this is an intervention around increasing knowledge — explaining to someone what it is we expect, and also why. Examples could include public health campaigns such as “Eat Five a Day” encouraging people to eat more fruit and vegetables, or the “Change for Life” campaign educating families on ways to be make healthier choices.
Persuasion — causing positive or negative feelings about an action. A good example here would be cigarette smoking — no-one can claim not to know about the negative health impact of smoking and yet many people persist in smoking. Persuasion here might be about family members talking to the individual or perhaps images on cigarette packs highlighting the impact on children of passive smoking.
Incentivisation — Rewarding the desired behaviour — with some financial or material reward. Many coffee shops will give you a discount on the cost of your latte if you bring your own cup, and many shops offer “loyalty cards” where you get points towards vouchers if you are a regular customer.
Coercion — Punishing, or charging someone for not complying. An example of it working in practice would be or when supermarkets charge customers for shopping bags to reduce the environmental impact of single use, disposable shopping bags that were previously available for free, or where minor misdemeanours such as littering and poor parking are met with fines.
NB — Coercion is the “punishing”” of negative behaviours, whereas incentivisation is the “rewarding” of positive behaviours. Especially in the workplace it will be easier, and much more pleasant to offer the carrot rather than the stick!
Training — Skills training — this differs from educating, as it is not just telling people what they should do — its explaining how to do it, and ensuring they have the necessary skills. At a basic level it might be training to make sure all users are familiar with the ability to delay the delivery of emails, or to work offline. It could also, for example, include time management training and training on work scheduling so that people make better use of their working hours and are less likely to be working late, and also learn to schedule their collaboration and communication time during normal working hours and do their more reflective and solitary work, as necessary, outside of normal working hours.
Enablement — Reducing barriers or increasing the means of carrying out a behaviour. In essence this intervention looks at making behaviour change as easy as possible — examples include getting the IT department on board to ensure there are options for delaying messages until core working hours, but this intervention can also include problem solving, goal setting and goal review as part of action planning that enables the team to be involved in the change.
Modelling — Providing examples or role models. There are a whole range of possible elements to this. Story telling can be hugely effective in helping people understand what is possible, dispelling concerns, celebrating the positive impact and so on. The use of case studies in a training context to explore scenarios might be an option. Role modelling is crucial to most examples of culture change. Seeing senior leaders leading by example can be more effective than any number of other interventions, just as poor behaviour by senior leaders can destroy the impact of other interventions.
Environmental restructuring — changing the physical and social environment. Some of what we have said about changes to the IT system might be thought of as environmental restructuring. In terms of the social environment, avoiding scheduling calls or meetings after 5.30 would contribute to a social environment that respected the idea of an end to the working day. In other scenarios, placing bins near takeaways would encourage their use. If you wanted to reduce the speed of cars through residential streets then you might consider speed humps, or the bollards that restrict traffic to a single lane from time to time. If you are working on healthier eating habits then you could put the salad options within easy reach and the chips tucked away and only available on request.
Restrictions — Introducing rules to limit the availability of negative behaviour — these could include imposing fines for parking in particular areas, or only permitting one packet of toilet roll to be sold per customer to reduce panic buying.
Working out which intervention is most likely to be helpful will be based on your analysis and “diagnosis” of the Capability, Opportunity and Motivation factors in play, using this table.
This table shows which intervention type is most relevant and effective for each area of the COM-B diagnosis that we want to tackle. In our example with Anika and Tom, who had identified Opportunity and Motivation as the “diagnosed” areas to treat, looking at the table, they decide to use Environmental Restructuring, Incentivisation and Modelling. Combining intervention types can be very effective, especially if they cover more than one area of your COM-B diagnosis.
The team at UCL have gone beyond the nine intervention types to identify more than 100 “behavioural change techniques” which are the smallest part of an intervention. If you are stuck for ideas of what action to take when designing your intervention they will provide inspiration. (This behavioural change techniques taxonomy is available free on iTunes and GooglePlay.)
Anika and Tom decide to involve help from the IT department, so that when an email is being sent out of hours, a pop up appears challenging the sender. Options to schedule the email within the recipients’ core hours are provided.
They are also going to incentivise employees with some heathy competition — with some token prizes for the winners. They will utilise data they garner from the I.T. departments on email usage outside of normal working hours to look at which teams have the most, the least, who makes improvements and so on, with a league table produced to encourage a little, gentle, rivalry.
Anika and Tom know they have strong support for their MBC work with the CEO of Example Org, Alison. They therefore get her to be extra vigilant in her own behaviour and to make a point of calling out emails she receives out of normal working hours where she does not believe them to have been time critical. They also get her to speak to a company wide town hall about the positive impact she has seen on her work and personal life as a result of changing her behaviours, and the conversation she has had with the company’s key client about it and how well that was received by the client. They also engage a recent new recruit from another MBC member organisation where they had rolled out a similar initiative to talk about how it played out over time, some of the challenges they faced, how they overcame those challenges, and the long term benefit of the change.
In the next article we will consider how we monitor the success of the process.
The COM-B model was developed and devised by Susan Michie, Maartje van Stralen, and Robert West in 2011 at University College London. We thank all at UCL who have worked on this behaviour change model, and especially those who have assisted us in learning about it, and discussing its implementation within the work the MBC does.
To find out more about the MBC and the work we do, visit our website or contact us directly — richard@mindfulbusinesscharter.com or charlotte@mindfulbusinesscharter.com
