Behavioural Science & The Future of Work. An experiment with culture and change in the wake of COVID-19. Funded by Innovate UK and in partnership with Nationwide Building Society.
Introducing MoreThanNow. MoreThanNow brings behavioural science to people and culture. We help organisations deliver more for their employees and help people lead better working lives. We run robust experiments to show exactly how our solutions cause shifts in behaviour and outcomes. We work with some of the largest organisations in the world, including BT, Ericsson, Novartis, and Citibank, and we collaborate with academics from leading institutions including London Business School, University College London, and the London School of Economics.
The Innovate UK Challenge and the Future of Work. Earlier this year, Innovate UK announced a £191m ‘Sustainable Innovation Competition’ to fund ideas across all sectors that will help the UK recover after COVID-19. MoreThanNow were awarded a grant to bring an experimental approach to culture and change in the wake of COVID-19. This report is the output of that project. It introduces how we use our ThinkSmall, TestLearnAdapt approach to help partners think more robustly about how to change behaviour. We applied this to the Future of Work and how employers can support team dynamics while working remotely, and brought that vision to life with an experiment at Nationwide Building Society.
"MoreThanNow have been pioneering the application of behavioural science to improve our work experiences for the past five years. The pandemic has accelerated the need for high-quality research to understand the changing nature of work. Now is the time to tackle workplace challenges and positively shape work culture through rigorous experimentation." Dr Laura Giurge Research Lead at MoreThanNow Fellow at London Business School
Contents. 01 | Changing Culture. 02 | Our Experiment: BAM at Nationwide. 03 | The Results.
01 |
Changing Culture. Why you should ThinkSmall and TestLearnAdapt.
Problems Too Big to Solve. It’s brilliant that organisations are aiming high when thinking about the Future of Work: They’re aspiring to be more innovative, inclusive and sustainable; to ‘transform’ employee wellbeing and productivity through new technologies and hybridworking practices. To achieve these goals in the past, leaders have tended to ThinkBig. They’ve invested in inspiring company conferences and employee engagement campaigns. They’ve planned learning programmes that focus on ‘mindset’ over ‘skillset’, rewiring our thinking in ways that will change our behaviour for evermore. Were these initiatives effective? It’s impossible to say, because they were so rarely evaluated with the rigour of an experiment. We can say that they don’t align well with the insights of behavioural science: whether that’s the importance of habits, the variability of context-dependent behaviour, or simply failing to account for the gaps that exist between our intentions and our actions.
The evidence that exists for the ineffectiveness of traditional approaches often comes as a shock to leaders. The last decade, for instance, saw corporations investing £billions on unconscious bias training, only for it to be shown to have a neutral to harmful effect on long-term behaviour change. How would behavioural science suggest you solve a problem like inequality or sustainability instead? By dismantling it into specific behaviours, addressing it piece by piece, and robustly testing your impact.
We call this #ThinkSmall & #TestLearnAdapt. It’s how we’ll design a new Future of Work.
How to ThinkSmall. Breaking down behaviour into small actions.
STEP ONE:
Define the outcomes you care about. What would you need to see after your change to say you’ve been successful? This sounds obvious but is often overlooked. If you want to improve performance, wellbeing or autonomy, you should ask yourself what those things mean and how, exactly, you’re going to measure them.
STEP TWO:
Prioritise. Which outcomes are most important to you? There might be hundreds of small behaviours relating to a cultural challenge, so acknowledge that you can't possibly solve everything at once. That's okay. Make a judgement on where to spend your time and resources.
STEP THREE:
Design an Intervention. What changes can you make to achieve those important outcomes? Your intervention is the change you’ll implement to improve your priority behaviour and outcome. Once again, designed with as much data and evidence as you can muster. Put together, your outcome and intervention result in a hypothesis. You think that doing X will help you achieve Y.
How to TestLearnAdapt. Learning what works through experimentation.
STEP ONE:
Select your sample.
Why?
Choose a group of employees that represent your workforce. If you want to know whether your intervention will work for your whole company, you need a sample that represents your whole company.
Avoid sample bias with accurate representation.
STEP TWO:
‘Pilots’ are often conducted in one division of a business, like HR, which is not reflective of the rest of the organisation. Unless your sample represents your whole population of interest, your results cannot be generalised.
Randomise.
Why?
Split the sample into a treatment group, who will receive your intervention, and a control group, who will stay the same. Don’t select employees or ask for volunteers! Randomising is the fairest and most scientificly robust way to allocate people to each group. If you want to test multiple interventions, you can randomise into multiple Treatment groups alongside the Control.
Avoid self-selection with random allocation.
STEP THREE:
Another type of sample bias occurs when people volunteer - or self-select - into receiving your intervention. If you don’t randomly assign the intervention, you can’t compare your treatment group to your control group, who decided not to take part.
Measure.
Why?
Conduct the intervention only with your treatment group, and measure the outcomes in your treatment and control groups in the same way to provide a comparison. This way, you can be confident that any significant difference is caused by your intervention.
Isolate the impact of your intervention. Imagine you’re testing a leadership intervention at the same time as your share price is rising. People might be happy, but that could be the result of better leadership or of the better price. Unlike a pilot, an experiment isolates the effect of the leadership programme because the rising share price will have affected both the treatment and the control group in the same way. The only difference between them is the leadership programme you're testing.
02 |
BAM. An Experiment at Nationwide Building Society. Our case study for experiments at work.
"It's our ambition to pioneer the Future of Work at Nationwide, and we've been delighted to partner with MoreThanNow on this groundbreaking initiative. We're proud to be asking more questions, and taking our partnership even further. " Jane Hanson
Chief People Officer, Nationwide Building Society
Improving workplace motivation. Building Belonging, Autonomy, and Mastery (BAM)
We developed a practical framework for strengthening motivation in the workplace through employee Belonging, Autonomy, and Mastery (BAM). This was based on the elements of Self-Determination Theory by Ryan and Deci (1957). The BAM framework captures different facets of the academic research about improving motivation and team dynamics at work. To put this research, and BAM, into practice, we designed a three-week experience to test with a group of Nationwide managers. We wanted to work with managers to build capability and embed the BAM approach into their leadership.
We started by introducing managers to the theory underlying BAM, and guided them through a reflection about how their team had responded to changed working practices during the pandemic. After this introduction, we put the onus on the managers. Each manager was encouraged to set up a reflective session with their team to discuss how the pandemic had shaped team dynamics, and to identify which of the BAM pillars their team was strongest at. To further strengthen Belonging, Autonomy, and Mastery in their teams, we provided the managers with a range of team tasks they could run through. These tasks were based on the behavioural science literature about self-determined motivation and team dynamics.
Learn.
Discuss.
Act.
Week 1
Week 2
Week 2-4
Breaking M down like B
Nominate a rotating Devil’s Advocate We asked participants to list upcoming team meetings for the two weeks following the workshop, and to nominate a Devil’s Advocate for each of these. By asking the Devil’s Advocate to challenge opinions at the meeting, we expected the teams would feel more able to challenge each other constructively.
Thank you notes to collaborator teams
Bi-weekly team lunches Proactive advice-seeking
The BAM Framework: how we h motivation and identify their tas
Our ability to challenge each other constructively Our connection to Nationwide and other teams
The strength of our personal relationships
Belonging. Our connection to each other and to Nationwide
Workplac Motivatio
Our ability to ask for help from each other
Self-reflection exercise on what you’re best at
Our ability to show our capabilities
Mastery. Our sense of accomplishment and learning
Block 1 hour of focus time to learn and practice Email team members about their positive development
Our ability to acquire new skills Our ability to feel competent at what we do
Motivation BAM.
Sub-domain
Domain.
Intervention (Team task)
helped managers break down sks.
Our ability to decide what we want to work on
Job-crafting task
Our ability to work independently Autonomy. Our ability to have a say in what we work on and how we work
ce on.
Our sense of accomplishment
Our ability to be our authentic selves Our freedom to express ideas in discussions
Celebrate small wins at the end of the week Research from Cornell Professor Kaitlin Woolley suggests that we are more engaged and motivated to do our work when we focus on the process rather than the end result. To ensure teams recognise small interim wins, we asked them to schedule a 30-min meeting once a week. Their task was to go around and share any small and big wins they achieved that week.
Withdraw from one non-urgent task weekly Invent a new job title for yourself
Silent brainstorming in meetings The concept of silent brainstorming was pioneered at Amazon and has grown in popularity in some of the highest-growth organisations in the world. It’s designed to use the brainpower of everyone in the meeting and to make sure there is time for independent ideas and thinking before a group discussion begins. To test its effectiveness in creating a freedom to express ideas, we asked participating teams to block 5 minutes at the beginning of meetings for silent brainstorming. Once the five minutes had passed, their task was to share ideas one-byone, therefore encouraging equal opportunities to speak up freely.
Evaluating the BAM programme. To test the impact of our BAM intervention, we took a sample of 50 teams and asked them to fill out a validated survey. This measured how managers and their teams scored on each pillar of BAM before we started. To supplement this survey data, we have asked people to provide Microsoft 365 Analytics data so we could see how much time they spent in meetings and collaborating. Our intervention phase began after randomisation and after all teams (both treatment and control) filled in the baseline survey.
Managers.
Control.
Business as usual.
Treatment.
Introducing the BAM framework and tasks.
The Control group went through a “placebo” workshop, where we told them about the experiment and how we are working on team dynamics without giving away the tasks. Contrary to the Control group, the workshop held for the Treatment group explained the theory of BAM and how we imagined bringing it to life. After a short introduction to the background, we moved on to describe how we would like them to use BAM over the next two weeks: “Pick an area of BAM where your team has strengthened over the past 12 months. Use the tasks we outlined to celebrate and build on your strengths to become even better at what you have already achieved!” At the end of the project, about 3-4 weeks after the workshops, we surveyed the Control and Treatment groups again to measure any changes.
“Science is a process, and MoreThanNow’s experiment with Nationwide Building Society is a beautiful example. There’s so much opportunity to improve working practices in the wake of the pandemic. We’ll only get there when we explore them with a critical eye and a scientific mind.” Joe Devlin
Professor of Neuroscience, Vice Dean of Enterprise and Innovation, University College London
Results. What we found out about team dynamics and motivation.
Autonomy. Managers participating in the workshops told us how the shift to working remotely focused on the theme of autonomy, or people ‘stepping up and making decisions’ over the period of the pandemic. In this light, we were not surprised that our Treatment group reported higher levels of autonomy compared to our Control group (p < .05): We predict this effect was partly driven by the Treatment teams’ reflection on the past, as well as the activities they did with their team over the 3-week period. All results show how the outcomes changed from our pre-study baseline survey. 10%
2.5%
0%
-10%
+6.5%
-4%
CONTROL
TREATMENT
DIFFERENCE
“By being constructive and challenging each other, our team demonstrated pride in being able to overcome challenges. Constructively challenging others requires respect of each other and each other’s different levels of ability”. — Participating Manager
Belonging. Given the personal nature of many of our tasks, we were surprised to find no significant overall effect on Belonging. Instead, we found interesting differences at the question level. 10%
10%
6% +9.7%
0%
8.7%
+7.2%
TREATMENT
DIFFERENCE
1.5%
0%
-3.7%
-10%
CONTROL
TREATMENT
DIFFERENCE
I feel like I can be myself at work.
-10%
CONTROL
I tend to socialise at work.
10%
10%
6.6% -11.5%
0%
0%
-1.9%
-4.9% -9.7%
-10%
CONTROL
TREATMENT
DIFFERENCE
No one on my team would undermine my efforts.
-10%
CONTROL
TREATMENT
-7.8%
DIFFERENCE
We accept everyone regardless of our differences.
While we can’t be sure of the drivers of the differences in these questions, we are concerned that we were effective in encouraging employees to open up, but that this wasn’t always received well in the team dynamic. It’s possible that without coaching or deeper instruction, certain popular tasks – such as celebrating small wins, or acting as a Devil’s advocate within the team – caused friction.
Mastery. We found no significant results in Mastery scores at group or individual question level. This null finding also points towards the need for testing further specific Mastery-focused interventions which can be observed over a prolonged period. Microsoft Analytics data Alongside survey data, we also had access to Microsoft Analytics metrics, telling us how people spent their time. While this was a voluntary contribution, our participants were keen to share this data with us. We measured whether there was any change in the time people spent in meetings, how many quiet days they had (i.e. the days when they didn’t work out of hours), and how much of their time they spent writing emails. While we didn't find a significant change in any of these metrics, we are pioneering a use of Microsoft Analytics data in experimentation. This is invaluable behavioural data to help us understand more about team dynamics.
“Sometimes how people feel and respond to interventions is counterintuitive. Nobody can tell you what will work with certainty. The only way to find out is to test them robustly”. Pieter Cornel
Behavioural Science Lead at MoreThanNow
03 |
The Conclusion. What’s next for BAM.
Are we rolling out? Not yet! The mixed results might sound like a disappointing outcome, but they demonstrate exactly why we experiment. Experimentation is all about iteration, and pinpointing when workplace initiatives need more development to achieve the intended results. The BAM intervention was based on existing research and built on previous programmes, but what we found was different from what we thought would happen in important ways. Nevertheless, we found plenty of positive results which will help us build on the effective elements of our intervention: • The pillar of Autonomy significantly improved in the Treatment group • Some elements of Belonging, such as socialisation at work, significantly increased • While no significant changes were achieved, we demonstrated the possibility to use MS Analytics data in experimental work We believe more support might be needed within the teams to make sure this didn’t have negative consequences. We have a history of working with the HR team at Nationwide, and building on these findings we would want them to be more involved in the execution of the programme. These results also demonstrate the need to robustly test culture change initiatives that are deployed with workforces working remotely. Office culture is quite different from working-from-home ‘culture’, and the team dynamics in which people work day in day out through virtual links may well operate differently than those we’re used to in-person.
What's next for the Future of Work The opportunities to rethink and reimagine people initiatives and ways of working are endless – there has never been such an exciting time to design a better Future of Work. To realise that potential, we need more than good intentions, we need to put our interventions to the test. At MoreThanNow, we’re delighted to be bringing our experimental approach to the big questions, whether it’s Sustainable Working from Home with the London School of Economics, Inclusive Hybrid Working with researchers from Exeter University, or our continuing work on culture and change at Nationwide Building Society.
“We invite more organisations to ask more questions, and embrace experimentation in their vision for change. There has never been a better time for Applied Behavioural Science.” Zsofia Belovai
Behavioural Science Associate at MoreThanNow
The Future of Work won’t be discovered fully formed. It will be designed, little-by-little, with countless opportunities to test and adapt along the way. This is not a time for answers, but for open minds, curiosity, and experimentation. The more we learn, the brighter the future will be.