How You Can Use Momentum to Sustain Behavioral Change

Getting new behavior to stick in an organization can be hard, especially when 70% of change programs fail. We’ve all heard the term “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and for a lot of us, it might be easy to apply that to our workplaces—after all, if on the surface current behavior is working just fine, why try to change it?

Of course, this line of thinking can also make it hard to move forward when current behavior isn’t working. Sometimes people are unwilling to change behavior even when they’re faced with negative consequences because that’s just how things have been done for a long time. In that case, you need to find a way to overcome perceived barriers and get behavior change to stick. In this blog, we’ll explain why your behavior change programs fail and how you can improve the uptake of behavioral change in your organization.

What is behavioral change?

Behavior change refers to the process of adjusting and transforming a group or individual’s actions, habits, and attitudes to meet desired outcomes. The goal is to change established mindsets and habits so that new behaviors align with both personal goals and organizational priorities.

Why behavior change fails to stick

When we asked around, 90.7% of companies said that they were experiencing an intention-behavior gap among employees. That is, their employees wanted to do training and may have understood why training was important, but they ultimately chose not to do it, or learning didn’t stick. The conclusion is that one-time change programs aren’t enough to sustain long-term shifts in behavior.

There are generally one or more key factors contributing to that intention-behavior gap and preventing behavioral change from happening.

1. Focusing too much on initial actions, rather than sustainable drivers of change, i.e. reinforcement. One-time intervention strategies are great for getting the ball rolling on behavior change, but it’s continued reinforcement of learning through methods like the spacing effect that actually improve long-term knowledge retention and prevent relapse.
2. Lack of purpose, or misalignment with organizational needs. A lot of people generally understand why they need to do training (it’s good for professional development, or it will “create better processes” for the business, or it’s just important to keep up with current trends). But they don’t always have a deep understanding of how it will actually do that, or what it means to them personally.
3. Company culture that doesn’t reflect or support a culture of continuous improvement, either because of organizational behavior (including a toxic culture or a general disinterest in learning) or the resources allocated to L&D. A continuous learning culture needs to be modelled by leaders—if leaders aren’t on board with learning, their teams won’t be either. And if resources aren’t set aside to support learning, it won’t succeed.
4. A lack of psychological safety. This can be fed by a lack of learning culture or environmental factors that affect a person’s confidence to try new things out. People will go back to old behavior if they face judgment, rejection, or punishment for adopting new behaviors.
5. No collective behavioral change. It’s always a win when employees learn something new, but individual behavior change alone doesn’t make a huge impact on the organization. And if you’re the only one going through behavior changes while everyone around you remains the same, it can discourage you from continuing.

The thing about these barriers is that they’re all issues of underlying processes or attitudes, rather than the learning itself. Making more or different learning won’t solve the gap between outcome expectations and actual outcomes. In fact, more learning makes employees less likely to participate at all, because the amount of content is overwhelming. What you need to do is change your learning strategy.

How Momentum aides behavioral change

We know creating an effective learning strategy can be time-consuming, especially if L&D strategy wasn’t rolled out with the intention of providing learning reinforcement. Plus, running regular reinforcement for knowledge retention can be pretty taxing on resources and administration.

This is where Momentum comes in to alleviate some of that strain on HR by automating your learning workflows. Momentum takes the manual effort out of continuous, regular intervention strategies by allowing you to set up workflows to send out learnings at key moments or streamline processes to automate learning pathways.

Let’s look at the onboarding process. The whole process from recruitment to first day to the end of probation involves a string of administrative tasks, including rolling out training to get new hires up to speed (and ideally reduce their time-to-proficiency). With Momentum, you can set each onboarding activity to trigger at certain times in a certain order. For example, when new talent starts, a capability assessment can be automatically sent to them and their manager. These assessments get filled out by the new hire and their manager to gauge their current capability levels (and therefore what training they’ll need to perform their job role).

When the probation period ends, Momentum workflows can trigger another capability evaluation for the manager to complete. If the employees’ capabilities have improved, then your behavior change program was successful. You’ll be able to determine which learning content was most effective in driving behavior change, as well as what learning pathways should be assigned to them for further capability development.

So let’s talk about learning pathways and course enrolment. When you complete a capability assessment using Momentum workflows, the answers provided can be used to assign certain content to learners. If a learner is in the sales team then Momentum can suggest sales courses based on the learners’ job description, capability set, and personal goals. This way the entire training path is personalized to a specific learner, making them more likely to engage in learning (and thus drive behavior change).

The same process can be carried out for your performance review cycle. Too often, reviews point out concerns from the previous performance cycle but don’t provide any solutions for undesirable behavior. And a lot of the time there were never any attempts to develop interventions during the performance cycle, either. With Momentum you can support stages of behavior change—like incremental goals or milestones—by assigning relevant learning to address performance gaps. It’s better than dumping a training course at the end of a lengthy performance period because it gives learners the chance to improve in the moment and address undesirable behaviors before they become ingrained.

For example, Momentum can send out performance evaluation assessments to be filled out, which reveals the performance gaps that need to be addressed. Effective development plans have smaller milestones and goals (like SMART goals) to track stages of change, as well as intervention strategies at regular intervals to increase the application of desirable behaviors. Using Momentum, triggers can be set to:

1. Send out reminders to participate in learning. This brings learners back to reinforce the capability development and reduce undesirable behavior.
2. Conduct performance evaluations at set milestones. This way, learners and managers alike can keep track of how progress has been made on defined healthy behaviors, informing the employees’ next personalized development plan.

The idea is that Momentum doesn’t let personal development plans stagnate—it continues the cycle of learning and performance so that employees stay motivated to learn while also improving their capabilities. It’s not a one-size-fits-all cycle, either. All learnings are goal-directed behavior interventions in that learning is tailored to learners’ needs.

Key takeaways

We built Momentum so that sustaining and supporting planned behavior change doesn’t have to be a huge resource sink for HR. No one wants to spend their time chasing up employees to do their training, or manually running a new capability assessment every month. Automating those processes makes sure that those learning reinforcement strategies happen regularly and effectively, building long-term behavioral change.