Human beings are animals. Impulsive, irrational animals.
I’ve met people that are actually offended by that statement; isn’t that bizarre? The fact that we live in a world where some can be offended by science is well…offensive.
Anyway, besides the obvious biological explanations for the above statement, what I am mainly referring to when I say human beings are animals is the fact that we as a species are overwhelmingly driven, motivated and persuaded by behavioral and emotional forces.
I work on the internal communications team of a technology company in a field heavily dominated by men…in plainer terms, old white men. The internal communications team consists of myself and four other women who create all internal employee communications for roughly 14,000 employees, much of the audience being the aforementioned demographic.
I started my job in January 2020, about five weeks before the pandemic hit the US. At that point, I had only had six months of previous experience in the communications field and unfortunately, that experience had zero practical training in crisis communications.
Overnight, my team was met with the overwhelming task of finding a way to communicate the importance of all on-site employees properly wearing face coverings while on-site.
Have you ever tried to persuade mostly older, white men to wear face masks all day in a red state?
Now…I know, I’m dumping an entire demographic of people into one, stubborn, “but my freedoms!!!” bucket, but that’s the world we are in.
Now that vaccines are readily available, our messaging has changed again to encourage all employees to get vaccinated. After the pushback we received trying to convince folks to mask up every day, we knew to create a meaningful culture change amongst employees, providing information alone wouldn’t cut it; we would need to be persuasive.
The elaboration likelihood model explains that there are two paths of persuasion in messaging. The peripheral path says if the recipient of the message is uninterested in the topic of the message, or if they are distracted by the way in which the message is presented, they will not permanently change their opinion on the subject, or form a new opinion. The central path explains that the better informed a recipient is on a topic, or if the message recipient has strong feelings or motivation towards a topic, the easier it is for the recipient is to be persuaded by the argument. Tapping into the animal instincts of humans through motivation and incentive would be the only way to change employee behavior through our messaging.
So, did we get every employee to get vaccinated or happily don a facemask when on-site? Well, no. But! We were able to turn a corner in employee behavior by placing the incentive aspect of our messaging front and center. Currently, all emails about Covid feature a banner stating all vaccinated employees do not have to wear a face covering at work. They will be given a large badge that reads “VACCINATED” and they will never be forced to “sacrifice” their freedoms again.
In no major surprise, knowing that being mask free at the office would be a huge incentive for our employees, we were able to distribute a message that sparked a huge uptick in the vaccination rates of our colleagues, which does a small but impactful step towards ending the pandemic.
Everyone can still stay six feet away from me though, that I’m good with.
