How can teams and leaders incentivize good habits at work? James Clear has some ideas.
Clear, author of the bestselling book “Atomic Habits,” shared tips for applying the science of good habits in the workplace while speaking at WOBI’s World Business Forum in New York City on Nov. 5.
Clear said business leaders should first consider a few questions.
“First is vision,” he said. “Does everybody know where we’re trying to go?”
Another key question is “What are we optimizing for?” Clear added.
“Sometimes you optimize for money, revenue growth, sometimes we optimize for creative freedom, sometimes you optimize for impact, sometimes you optimize for lifestyle, time with family,” he said. “But whatever it is, you should be clear about what that is.”
Clear said the desired behavior will follow naturally “if the incentives are cleanly aligned.”
To evaluate this in your workplace, ask yourself, “Who bears the cost, who reaps the reward and who does the work?” Clear said. “When the incentives are aligned, the same person is the answer to all three of those questions.”
This probably isn’t the case in most workplaces currently, he said. While Clear acknowledged incentives are “very tricky” to get right, he said they’re “powerful enough that it’s worth spending probably a couple months thinking about it and trying to figure out, ‘Is there a better way?'”
Optimize your workspace
Asked how businesses can encourage employees to practice good habits at work, Clear said to assess employees’ working environment.
“If everybody’s in the same office, you can look at like how are we laying this out, how is this environment organized? Is it easy for people to do the habits that we want them to do, what are the obvious things?” he said.
Clear shared an example from his own work. He has a home office and leaves his phone in a separate room until lunch to try to minimize distractions and keep himself on track in the mornings.
On any given morning, “either I open up Google Docs and I start writing the next thing, or I go to ESPN,” he said. “What happens in the first hour is really shaped by what happens in the first, like, 3 seconds.”
Even though it would only take a few seconds to retrieve his phone from the other room if he wanted to, Clear doesn’t because “just a little bit of distance, a little bit of friction” is enough to discourage him from doing so.
But it doesn’t end with the physical workspace. Don’t forget about the digital aspect of work too, Clear said.
“People spend a lot of time looking at their screens,” he said. “What does the dashboard look like? Are the KPIs obvious, you know, what does their phone look like? What kind of emails do people receive? There’s some questions there that may be optimized in terms of what the workplace software is doing.”
At work or at home, encouraging good habits boils down to making those practices obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying, Clear said.
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