Nudging in changing employee behaviour: a novel approach in organizational transformation

Nudging is a Nobel prize-winning concept that government agencies and Business-to-Consumer companies alike have widely adopted. Until now, nudging has not found its way into changing employee behavior during an organizational transformation, nevertheless the apparent advantages. The main problem: how to deliver, repeatedly, a personal, relevant, and motivating message to a large number of (potentially thousands) employees in an organization?

Usually, behavioral data cannot be found in the company data warehouse; you have to ask people. In this study, to address this problem, we designed a different survey scale than the usual Likert scale. We used an Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) platform to deliver personal dashboards to managers and employees. And these dashboards were the result of an organization-wide questionnaire paired with an A.I.-driven target setting. These dashboards showed – tailor-made – why to improve and what to improve, how to do that, and who could help improve whom. We sent a comparable questionnaire plus dashboards to the same audience (approx. 700 people in one organization) twice. The first time without nudging, the second time, the dashboards were accompanied by email nudges that guided respondents in using their dashboard. The second time, we saw 40% more clicks and 20% better clicks as an indicative figure. We defined better clicks as looking at dashboard pages that bring respondents in the ‘action mode’: what and how to improve and who can help whom.