Employee Engagement: Get on the Change Grid

Are you on the grid?

Making change? Are you looking for a set of tools that can help you make change? Perhaps you want to improve specific elements of employee engagement. Can you differentiate what is needed to change behavior one time versus from now on? How well do you distinguish what is required to perform a new behavior versus decrease the intensity of an existing behavior?

Out of the fog and into the grid. BJ Fogg, from Standford University, has developed a practical tool to enhance your change ability. He offers a wizard and a grid (see below)  to help you change behavior. The grid columns are based on behavior represented as:

• Dot: One time
• Span: Period of time
• Path: From now on

The rows are based on color and behavioral intention:

• Green: Do new behavior
• Blue: Do familiar behavior
• Purpose: Increase behavior intensity
• Gray: Decrease behavior intensity
• Black: Stop existing behavior

Don’t be color blind. The Fogg Behavior Grid describes 15 ways behavior can change. The purpose is to help people think more clearly about behavior change. Each of the 15 behaviors types uses different psychological strategies and persuasive techniques. For example, the methods for persuading people to buy a book online (Blue Dot Behavior) are different than getting people to quit smoking forever (Black Path Behavior).

Grid and Wizard. You may click any behavior type in the Behavior Grid to see an overview. However, you may wish to begin with The Behavior Wizard a short diagnostic tool to asses the type of behavior you are interested in. For example to achieve a Blue Path Behavior, three elements must come together at once.

Trigger, Motivation, and Ability. As the Fogg Behavior Model describes, you must trigger the behavior when the person is both motivated and able to perform it. This combination must happen over and over, as the habit gets created or strengthened.

Trigger: A prompt must tell a person to “do this behavior now.” Triggers can take many forms, ranging from links in email (click here) to internal signals from our body, like a grumbling stomach (eat now).

Motivation: A person must have sufficient motivation when the trigger occurs. Three core motivators exist:

Sensation(pleasure/pain),

Anticipation (hope/fear), and

Belonging (acceptance/rejection)

Ability:  The person must have the ability to perform the behavior when the Trigger occurs.

An earlier version of this post is on the  Shared Visions Website.

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David Zinger is a global employee engagement expert who founded the 3800 member employee engagement network. Contact David at www.davidzinger.com to request his workshop, presentations, or consulting.