How to Implement Behavior Design In the Workplace
All success in organizations comes down to one thing: behavior.
If you lead a team or organization, you’re probably familiar with the myriad of project management systems, frameworks, strategies, and approaches that exist for getting work done. Everyone engages in “strategic planning” and “goal-setting.” Everyone knows about the importance of setting “OKRs.”
But what is it all actually for?
It’s for changing the behavior of you and the people on your team.
At the most basic level, all successful teams and organizations have one thing in common: they do the things that achieve the organization's key results.
In other words, they behave in ways that produce desired outcomes.
But the truth is, no matter how comprehensive your project management system or how expansive your goal-setting frameworks are, none will help if they don’t purposefully change behavior. In fact, complicated frameworks and approaches to planning and project management can sometimes get in your way.
When you understand how behavior works — how to pinpoint it, analyze it, and create principled interventions for changing and maintaining it — the sky is the limit for you and your organization.
In this post, you’ll learn a core set of behavior design principles for changing the behavior of the people you lead.
They’re each grounded in insights from the field of Applied Behavior Analysis and presented against the backdrop of my own experience working with organizations.
Let’s dive in.
Pinpointing
A behavior is a movement of your muscles or your glands.
So often, I hear managers describe behavior using broad and general phrases that fail to describe behavior accurately.
We’ve all heard people describe the behavior of others with phrases like:
“Difficult to work with”
“Unpredictable”
“Hard working”
“Unmotivated”
“Talented”
“Chaotic”
But to successfully implement behavior design in your organization, you have to start defining behaviors with “pinpoint” accuracy (i.e., pinpointing).
Pinpointing is about identifying and defining the specific behaviors that generate progress toward your key results.
One common pitfall I observe in organizations is that they engage in goal-setting activities (like creating OKRs), but don’t pinpoint behaviors that generate the progress that will achieve those OKRs).
It’s not enough to know that you want a 20% increase in sales this quarter if you don’t also pinpoint the behaviors that will get you there.
While it is important (and necessary) to clarify the objectives of your organization and create measurable key results to achieve them, if you stop short of defining the behaviors that achieve those key results, you’ll be far less likely to reach them.
To illustrate this, let’s take a simple example of a salesperson.
Let’s say a salesperson is working toward increasing their quarterly sales by 20%. The salesperson has an infinite number of ways to achieve this. Depending on their experience, they may or may not engage in effective activities that will reach this key result. In fact, as is often the case, they’ll try many things, many of which may not be effective. Meanwhile, very little progress is made toward the key result, while managers become frustrated and the salesperson begins to feel overwhelmed.
If, instead, the team used its proprietary knowledge about which behaviors generate progress toward increasing sales (using its history of past sales success), the salesperson no longer needs to problem-solve their way to find sales. Instead, they can focus on increasing the specific behaviors that have proven to generate progress.
For example:
Make 25 site visits per week from contacts on the warm lead list
Send 50 cold emails per week using a pre-defined template
Make 100 cold calls per week using the sales call script
Pinpointing these driving behaviors makes them clear, specific, and measurable.
Using tools like Notion, managers and team leads can capture and generate metrics about each level of the sales funnel and reinforce the specific actions that are creating progress.
The Four Functions of Behavior
As humans, we don’t emit behaviors arbitrarily or randomly — we do them for specific reasons. We call these functions.
The function of a behavior is the reason why it occurs.
Before ever trying to change a behavior, whether for yourself or others, you need to determine its function.
All behaviors we emit, whether in our personal lives or the professional world, satisfy one of four functions:
Access
Attention
Self-stimulation
Escape
When you know the precise function of a behavior, you’re equipped to modify the variables around it that can increase, decrease, or stop the behavior altogether.
The tool we use to determine the function of a behavior is called an ABC Analysis.
The ABC Analysis
All behaviors occur within a context.
This context includes a few different variables, but in general, they are:
Antecedents - Events that occur just before the behavior
Consequences - Events that occur immediately after the behavior
For this reason, when analyzing behaviors, you should begin by observing multiple occurrences of behavior, particularly what occurs immediately before and immediately after the behavior.
In context, this looks like:
Antecedent → Behavior → Consequence
When conducting an ABC Analysis, you should observe as many occurrences of the behavior as possible. The more data you collect around the occurrences of your target behavior, the more accurate your determination of the function will be.
To conduct an ABC analysis, create a chart with three columns:
Antecedent Behavior Consequence Events that occur before the behavior happens. The pinpointed behavior itself Events that occur immediately after the behavior happens.
This simple analysis can give you powerful context and insight into why certain behaviors occur (i.e., their function).
There are tons of opportunities for conducting ABC analysis, and you can conduct them on almost any behavior that occurs in the workplace. A proper ABC analysis can go a long way to help you figure out why behavior is or is not occurring the way you want it to.
Reinforcement: How to Increase Behaviors
The most important principle of behavior design is reinforcement.
A reinforcement is any consequence that occurs after a behavior that increases the likelihood of it occurring again.
The simplest way to think of this is when teaching someone a new skill and providing verbal praise (”Nice job”) after a successful attempt. If that verbal praise increases the probability of that behavior occurring again in the future, it’s a reinforcer.
Conversely, if a consequence that occurs after a behavior decreases the likelihood of it occurring again in the future, it’s not a reinforcement, it’s a punishment.
I once had a conversation with a manager trying to get a worker to increase social media posting frequency for their small business. When I suggested reinforcing strategies (to help them increase social media posting in the future), the manager responded, “I’ve tried positive reinforcement, but it doesn’t work.”
By this point, I hope you can see why this statement is completely illogical — if it doesn’t increase behavior, it isn’t a reinforcer. Whatever the manager was doing wasn’t reinforcement. It was likely a punishment.
No matter what kind of behavior change you want to create in your team, reinforcement (or withdrawal of it) is the most powerful variable you can work with to achieve it.
Positive vs. Negative Reinforcement
One of the most misunderstood terms in behavior is the difference between positive and negative.
Most people think that “positive” reinforcement refers to the attitude with which you provide reinforcement. “Positive” reinforcement might be thought of as saying, “Good job!” or “I love the way you did that.” Whereas “negative” reinforcement is incorrectly thought of as, “You didn’t do this correctly,” or, “I’m not happy with your performance.”
In reality, the terms positive and negative have nothing to do with the “attitude” with which you provide reinforcement. Instead, positive and negative refer to whether you’re applying or removing a stimulus.
For example, if a team member submits an update to a webpage that increases your total on-page time by 15%, you might verbally praise them by saying, “I can’t believe you pulled that off. Amazing work on that project.” If a few weeks later, the team member comes up with a new idea and submits another update that further improves the on-page time, this verbal praise would be an example of positive reinforcement. You applied a stimulus (you told the person the verbal praise) which increased the probability of it occurring again.
On the other hand, if you removed a stimulus that increased the likelihood of the behavior occurring again in the future, you would’ve applied a negative reinforcement. For example, if the same scenario occurred (the worker submitting the page update), and you respond with, “Amazing work on that project. Don’t worry about sending me this week’s performance report, enjoy a bit of extra free time this week.” In this scenario, you reinforced the behavior by removing something you know the person doesn’t prefer (a long and tedious weekly report).
Both scenarios would be examples of reinforcement since they increase the likelihood of the behavior occurring again. They only differ in how they were delivered (one applying reinforcement and the other removing something undesirable).
Positive Reinforcement In the Workplace
In general, positive reinforcement is one of the most effective ways to increase behavior you want more of. This means applying a consequence that increases the likelihood of behavior occurring again.
In principle, positive reinforcement can be just about anything.
Each of us is different. We each have a preference for different reinforcers. What’s reinforcing for one person may not necessarily be reinforcing to another person. This means that effective management, from the perspective of behavior change, is largely about knowing what is reinforcing to each person and arranging an environment in which target behaviors produce those reinforcers.
The obvious question here is how do you know what’s reinforcing for each person on your team?
Luckily, it’s not as complicated as it seems. Here are a few considerations:
Verbal Praise and Acknowledgement
It goes without saying that under normal conditions, most of us yearn for acceptance and self-efficacy, and respond favorably to verbal praise.
While most managers waste time looking for behaviors to reprimand, they’re simultaneously missing out on valuable opportunities to reinforce behaviors that generate impact. No matter who you are, you’ll always change “better” when you feel better — when you feel like you’re winning and what you do matters.
If effective management is about increasing behaviors that generate impact, then it goes without saying that effective management is about strategically reinforcing those behaviors.
The best thing about specific verbal praise is it only takes a few seconds to deliver, costs nothing, and has powerful effects on the recipient.
So anytime you find that a team member did something you want to see more of, don’t miss the opportunity to provide specific verbal praise.
Token Economy Data Tracking
While managers may not always be able to be present to deliver verbal praise and acknowledgment, the use of data tracking can be a great way to provide positive reinforcement to workers, especially when paired together with a token economy.
The simplest example of a token economy is money. When we show up and perform well at work, we receive “tokens” (i.e., money). And money is valuable because of what we can trade it for.
Similarly, a token economy is a system of delivering reinforcement via “tokens,” in which the occurrences of desired behaviors grant access to tokens to the performer based on preset stipulations. Of course, workers receive paychecks for showing up and performing at work. But what if they also received tokens they could use in exchange for things they wanted?
The daily behaviors of workers can be tracked using simple project management tools and proof of work. When tasks are assigned to team members and those tasks are completed (with proof of work provided), tokens can be systematically awarded to the team member, which can accrue over time. So long as these points can be exchanged for preferred items or benefits, these points can function as reinforcers.
Of course, one caveat to always be wary of with token economies is to be careful that workers do not “game the system.” Depending on your system and the size of your team, workers can find clever ways to increase their points in self-serving ways. This is why “proof of work” is an important component of token economies in the workplace.
The Premack Principle
It’s unreasonable to expect your team members to have a high preference and motivation to complete every task they’re responsible for. Anyone with a job or who has worked with clients knows that some aspects of work are preferred and others aren’t.
Nonetheless, all successful teams get team members to do things they would otherwise not want to do.
One strategy for getting around this is known as the Premack Principle (also known as "Grandma's rule" or "first/then"). This principle states that more probable or preferred behaviors tend to reinforce less probable or less preferred behaviors.
To implement this yourself, pay attention to what your team members do when they have downtime or when they finish their duties for the day. Are they resorting to creative projects? Are they engaging in social engagement with other workers? Are they doing research for a personal idea they’ve been talking about? These more probable behaviors are perfect for using the Premack Principle.
Most managers actively work to decrease these kinds of activities in the workplace, missing out on the value they could be getting out of them. If workers are allowed to engage in those preferred activities if and only if they first complete less preferred activities, odds are, not only will those less preferred behaviors get done, but they’ll likely get done quicker.
Some years ago, I remember a colleague telling me about a management technique Google implemented employees were allowed to work on a self-selected personal project of their choosing for 20% of the time they spent at work*.* They called it the “20% Time” policy.
At face value, this seems counterintuitive. Why would you pay workers to work on personal pet projects while at work if you’re paying them to do what you want?
But by this point, the rationale should seem obvious. This approach surprisingly worked out so well for Google that some of their most prized products (Google Calendar, for example) were born out of these personal pet projects. If they had not allowed workers that 20% time allowance, these products might not exist the way they do today.
Using the Premack Principle in your team and workplace can lead to huge benefits over time while increasing the probability of work getting done at reasonable rates.
Look for the preferred, high-probability behaviors your team members engage in that no one is making them do, and make them contingent on the completion of non-preferred, lower-probability behaviors.
Tangible Reinforcers
Think of tangible reinforcers as “prizes” or preferred items (like money) that can be delivered to the team member upon completing a project or task.
While less accessible than verbal praise, tangible reinforcers are an obvious and effective way to reinforce team members. The most common are bonuses or new gear for getting work done. While they can be more difficult to arrange and provide, when used strategically, they can go a long way in increasing target behaviors over time.
Tangible reinforcers work best after completing or reaching a larger project or goal, while praise and the Premack Principle work best for more frequent day-to-day operations.
Rules for Reinforcement
For reinforcement to be effective (and truly be a reinforcer), be sure you follow a few key principles:
Contingency - Reinforcement should be delivered contingent on the pinpointed behavior you want to increase. Always be careful not to indirectly reinforce behaviors you don’t want more of (which is more common than not).
Immediacy - Reinforcement should be delivered immediately after the pinpointed behavior; the less time between the behavior and the reinforcement the better.
Scheduled - Over time, reinforcers lose their efficacy. Similar to how drinking a tall glass of water satiates your thirst, reinforcers similarly cause satiation over time. To avoid satiation, it’s best to alternate reinforcement, where in the beginning you deliver it as frequently as possible, and, over time, you either switch to new reinforcers or reinforce the behavior less frequently.
Getting Behaviors to Start Happening
In some cases, there are behaviors you want to start happening, but for whatever reason, they’re not.
BF Fogg’s Behavior Model is one of the best tools to figure out how to get behaviors to start occurring.
Fogg’s behavior model illustrates that three key variables are necessary for a behavior to occur:
Motivation
Ability
Prompting
If one of the variables is missing, the behavior will likely not occur. Fogg illustrates this via the equation:
B = MAP
When troubleshooting behavior and determining a plan to get a behavior to start occurring, it’s best to troubleshoot the behavior in reverse order, that is:
Check if there is a clear, obvious, and reliable prompt
Ensure the person has sufficient ability (the behavior is possible and easy enough for the person to do it)
Ensure the person has sufficient motivation to do the behavior
When target behavior is not occurring, managers often threaten their workers to get the behavior to occur. But rather than wasting that energy on becoming upset and berating workers, a smarter manager would look at the behavior through the lens of the Behavior Model and determine which of the three key variables is missing.
In most cases, by fixing the missing variable, the behavior will begin to occur without the need for threats and arguments.
Some common mistakes I see in this realm include:
Insufficient prompting. Without clear and specific instructions or sufficient reminders, behaviors won’t occur, even if the person can do them and has sufficient motivation. Project management tools like task lists, automated reminders, visual aids, emails, and verbal reminders are great examples of simple prompts managers can use to prompt workers.
Ambiguous prompting. Project management tools like Notion can make for incredible prompting systems, allowing managers to break projects into specific tasks for each team member to complete. But sometimes, the tasks we assign workers using project management tools are so ambiguous that the worker ignores them altogether. Without knowing exactly what’s expected of them, assignments are processed as “noise” and ignored altogether. One tip when using project management tools is to define tasks beginning with a verb and describing exactly what you want the person to do. For example, rather than writing, “Content,” as a task, instead write, “Curate at least 25 pieces of photo/video content in the campaign Google Drive folder.”
Insufficient ability. Very often, managers will assign tasks to workers that they don’t have the ability to complete. This can be due to knowledge gaps (the worker doesn’t know what the specific required sub-tasks are) or the worker lacks technical requirements (logins, access to tools, lack of materials, etc.). Always ensure that what you’re assigning to a team member is within their ability to complete. When possible, break larger, more difficult tasks into smaller, more manageable tasks and assign them in a simple sequence.
Notes on Motivation in the Workplace: Self-Efficacy, Autonomy, and Culture
Motivation is one of the most difficult factors to influence as a manager or leader.
One important ingredient for motivation in the workplace is what’s known as self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is a person’s belief that they can do what’s necessary to produce specific results. Think of it as a person’s belief that they can “do it.”
When we have low self-efficacy, we’re less likely to set big goals or engage in learning and skill development. Low self-efficacy can cause us to “shut down” or do the “bare minimum” to “get by.” All these can be highly detrimental to an organization with ambitious goals for high performance.
If your goal is to produce a culture of people who “go above and beyond” or who produce great work, focusing on increasing self-efficacy is a great starting point.
Another important ingredient for motivation is autonomy.
When we feel trusted and are given the responsibility as professionals to “do what we do,” our motivation can increase.
When it comes to increasing motivation among your team, here are a few practical tips that incorporate elements of both of these principles:
Provide Shaping Feedback
While honest and direct feedback is important for improving any skill, it’s important to be mindful of how we provide that feedback.
When workers fail to produce exactly what you wanted, you have a choice: do you “punish” or “berate” that person, or do you nudge them in the direction you need them to go? Unfortunately, when faced with deadlines and external demands, leaders often resort to the former. But simple behavior science would prove that the opposite is more effective.
A simple rule is that when a worker or team member makes an effort to produce something you assigned them, you should always praise the effort, yet provide clear and simple feedback for a second version closer to what you want. Think of it like nudging them in the right direction, closer to what you want. This process should be repeated until the worker produces what’s required, at which point, you can point out to the worker that the intended result was produced.
In behavior, this is known as shaping feedback.
Think of shaping feedback as reinforcing successive approximations toward a goal. It’s not uncommon for workers to produce work that isn’t exactly what we wanted, but while it may not seem like it, everyone wants feedback for improvement. What matters is how we deliver it and how it affects the worker’s future efforts.
As a leader, it’s your job to guide your people toward results instead of threatening them to produce what’s required. All the while, the shaping feedback you provide to workers helps them improve, increases the likelihood of them getting it right sooner, and ensures everyone is always improving toward the outcomes you want.
The more you improve at providing shaping feedback, the more initiative your workers will take, and the fewer iteration cycles will be required. Workers often feel insecure about their ability to produce what’s wanted because they don’t know how you’ll respond or don’t clearly understand what you want. Shaping feedback addresses these barriers by providing clear feedback to workers (thereby improving their future work quality) while increasing their confidence because they know they’ll be more likely to get helpful feedback instead of antagonizing threats.
Provide Options
Another great strategy for increasing motivation in workers is to provide options.
In the workplace, workers are rarely free to choose what to work on and how to work on it. But for a professional who has high self-efficacy, this is critical.
When people feel trusted with the flexibility to choose between options (as opposed to being forced into a situation or method), they’re more motivated. This is due to the individual getting the sense that they chose whatever method or plan of action they eventually took.
When you need something specific from the people in your team, challenge yourself to find ways to increase options to produce it. This can also lead to increased buy-in, more creativity, and better problem-solving.
Optimize for Task Variation
As humans, we thrive on novelty.
When our work experiences and demands are rigid and monotonous, motivation diminishes. On the contrary, when we can work on different things and use different tools in our toolkit, this increases the novelty of our work, and thus, can improve our motivation. Not to mention, it can also make us more adaptable to unique challenges.
In traditional work environments, teams are typically grouped by department — marketing, human resources, creative, etc. But in some work environments, like Duolingo, teams are built based on key results. This is a great approach to cross-pollinate talent and ability among your team members and keep things interesting for everyone.
As Luis Von Ahn, CEO of Duolingo, explains in this interview with Tim Ferriss, teams are built around key metrics that matter to the company (time spent learning, revenue per day, etc.). This naturally requires the expertise of varied team members instead of a siloed team of like expertise. This might mean a role in marketing, a technical role, and a creative role combining their expertise to optimize a specific key result. Once the metric is reached, the team can be disbursed and team members can be put in new teams, or, the team can continue to work on novel solutions for increasing that key metric even further.
In my own experience, I’ve found this to be a great way to increase novelty and task variation for workers, especially in larger teams. The bottom line is that team members should be given a high degree of task variation, allowing them to regularly work on new challenges and problems instead of getting lost in a single role.
Foster a Culture of Self-Efficacy
When we feel like we’re winning and are part of a team of winners, that culture is contagious.
Fostering a predictably positive and supportive work environment is a huge part of maintaining an environment where everyone stays motivated, despite challenges or setbacks. When we feel others around us are motivated to do great work, and we can see evidence of it occurring, it has powerful effects on our motivation.
In many workplaces, managers resort to threats and punitive tactics to motivate workers. In most cases, these efforts backfire, leading to burnout, frustration, and low motivation.
The goal should always be to praise great work throughout the organization’s teams, publicly celebrate specific individuals who are producing great work, and constantly reinforce the theme of collective self-efficacy.
Encourage workers to collaborate and learn from one another by sharing best practices and “pro tips.” Avoid pitting workers against each other through competition, while encouraging teams to instead work toward goals as a collective.
When everyone feels part of a winning team, everyone’s motivation will be higher.
Blend Attainable Goals with Stretch Goals
One of the most misunderstood facets of leadership relates to goal-setting.
There are many opinions around goal-setting, particularly around how to set goals and how high to set those goals. In recent years, the popularity of “stretch goals” has dominated management thinking. The idea is that goals should always be set to a high enough level that the person (or team) has to stretch to achieve them.
Unfortunately, this blanket approach to goal-setting can have detrimental effects, and as you’ll see below, can sometimes backfire.
Goals don’t change anything if they’re not also paired with reinforcement.
At the most basic level, goal-setting is just a practice that creates opportunities for reinforcement. It doesn’t matter that you set a stretch goal if the team can’t (and doesn’t) reach it, and thus, doesn’t contact any reinforcement.
While it may seem counterintuitive, the best way to set goals is to blend easily attainable goals with stretch goals in a specific pattern. One approach is dividing stretch goals into smaller sub-goals that follow an S-curve. For example, initial sub-goals might be low and easily attainable, later sub-goals could be more difficult to attain, and finally, at the very end, more easily attainable sub-goals lead the team or individual to the finish line.
This is one of the most effective ways to ensure that teams working toward goals contact reinforcement, experience an adequate level of challenge, and make it to the finish line.
Celebrate Success
We have more motivation when we’re certain of a clear and desirable outcome at the end of our efforts.
It’s usually best to pre-define clear rewards and celebrations that will follow the completion of tasks or a series of tasks (projects). For example, every X the person completes, they get Y reward. With teams, if X metric is achieved, they’ll receive Y benefit.
While this may seem overly simplistic, this is how human behavior operates. When we’re certain of a big payoff at the end of a difficult series of behaviors, we’re more likely to engage in the work required to complete them.
By making this obvious and public to workers, you can increase motivation and get more of the behaviors you want.
Decreasing (or Stopping) Behavior
One general principle to always keep in mind is that if a behavior is occurring repeatedly over time, something is reinforcing it.
When it comes to decreasing or stopping behavior in the workplace, just as the application of reinforcement can increase it, the removal of reinforcement can decrease it and in some instances, stop it altogether.
Simply put, if you can identify the reinforcer (see ABC Analysis above), you can intervene by removing that reinforcer.
Extinction: Removing the Reinforcer
In behavioral terms, extinction is a procedure where reinforcement for a previously reinforced behavior is discontinued.
As with other behavior changes you want to make, you should always begin with pinpointing the specific behavior you want to decrease or stop. This includes defining the behavior in specific terms using a verb and a description of the behavior itself.
After you’ve pinpointed the behavior, conduct an ABC analysis to figure out what antecedent events and prompts are occurring, as well as what’s occurring after the occurrence of the behavior. You’ll find that all problem behaviors occur because of specific functions. Typically, this falls into one of three categories: the person doing the behavior is getting access to something they want, they’re getting attention for doing the behavior, or they’re escaping something they don’t want.
Once you determine why the behavior is occurring (its function) as well as what’s reinforcing it, you’re ready to start creating an intervention.
In general, providing an extinction intervention in the workplace should involve the following steps:
Choose a specific alternative behavior that provides a similar (or equivalent) reinforcer. Make a public announcement to team members about the new way to do the behavior. This might include informing team members of the new way of submitting something, using an app or tool, or completing a specific task. It’s critical that you make the new standard public and known to everyone before implementing the intervention.
Remove the reinforcer from whatever environment it's being delivered in. This might mean changing a protocol, updating rules, or altering the environment in some way so that the reinforcer can no longer be achieved.
Ensure the reliability of the new reinforcer. For the newly implemented protocol, ensure that an equivalent reinforcement is provided immediately and contingent on the completion of the new behavior. Most importantly, make sure it’s reliable (i.e., when the behavior occurs, it should generate the reinforcer).
Plan for extinction bursts. In behavior terms, an extinction burst is a temporary increase in the frequency, intensity, or duration of a behavior that occurs when reinforcement for that behavior is withheld or removed. Simply put, when you remove the reinforcer to the old behavior, you should expect it to get “worse” before it gets better. This is natural but only lasts for a short time. If alternative reinforcement is provided to workers for the new behavior, this period will be much shorter, but it’s a perfectly normal part of any extinction process.