Are You Ready to Nudge? Nudging for Marketers!
The role of marketing today cannot be defined to its narrow definition as marketing to be considered a business perspective of the organization. Accordingly, the broader marketing perspective encapsulates creating value for employees, customers, investors, and society. In this context, marketers need to deal with needs beyond customers, and how to deal with them is pretty challenging. This article explores ways of engaging the broader sector in today’s context and expects to be mindful of few aspects of human engagement.
Human Resources frontiers are creating multiple challenges in attracting and retaining talent in companies. This has significantly widened because millennials are taking over the workplace. On the one hand, the millennials do not expect a job, but the experience and thought process is different from the other generations. The challenge would become more severe as it has been predicted that the global workforce would consist of 50% millennials by 2020 and 75% by 2025 (www.pwc.com, 2016). One common belief is that millennials are not loyal to their companies and easily switch employers. While this notion may deter some companies from investing in their younger employees, many others find it a potential misconception. However, it is evolving that millennials should be managed with reinforcements, such as clear guidelines, frequent and immediate feedback, mentoring, and setting clear expectations (Eric LaCore, 2015).
Employee Engagement is identified in this context as one of the vital driving solutions during the last two decades, especially by HR leaders/practitioners, several researchers, and academia to achieve organizational performance. Employee engagement is defined as the harnessing of organization members to their work roles; in engagement, people express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally during role performances (Khan, 1990). This is not the only definition available for employee engagement, probably the most suitable basis for this text.
Against this backdrop, a survey conducted by Society for Human Resource Management-SHRM (2013) in collaboration with Globoforce has found that nearly half (47%) of HR professionals believed that employee engagement is the essential HR challenge in their organizations. The study above also revealed that an overwhelming majority (94%) of organizations believe positive feedback impacts employee performance. Optimal levels of employee engagement can vary from industry to industry despite having mechanisms in place in organizations to promote a particular workplace setting to gain the optimum level.
Schaufeli et al. (2002) pointed out that the importance of this topic is proven by its positive consequences for the organization and employees. There are significant positive outcomes from building employee engagement, and both practitioners and academic literature seem to be more or less consistent regarding the benefits of employee engagement. Almost all major consultancy firms state a connection between employee engagement and profitability through higher productivity, increased sales, customer satisfaction, and employee retention (Bakker & Leiter, 2010). In academic circles, positive consequences on work engagement are also associated with customer satisfaction, productivity, profit, employee turnover (Harter et al., 2002), positive work attitudes, individual health, extra-role behaviors, and performance (Schaufeli & Salanova, 2007).
Employee engagement is considered not a theoretical construct in academic circles. Still, it exists within a given industry or an organizational context, and most survey firms and consultancy firms have done a business out of this concept. However, there is also a misconception about employee engagement among these academic circles and consultancy firms. This is amply underpinning via several definitions;
- Perrin’s Global Workforce Study (2003) uses the definition as employees’ willingness and ability to help their company succeed, mainly by providing discretionary effort on a sustainable basis. According to their study, employee engagement is affected by emotional and rational factors relating to work and the total work experience.
- Gallup organization defines employee engagement as the involvement with and enthusiasm for work. As cited by Dernovsek (2008), Gallup likens employee engagement to a positive employees’ emotional attachment and employees’ commitment.
- Robinson et al. (2004) define employee engagement as a positive attitude towards the organization and its value. An engaged employee is aware of the business context and works with colleagues to improve performance within the job for the organization’s benefit. The organization must develop and nurture engagement, which requires a two-way relationship between employer and employee.
Engaging employees for greater productivity is a challenge today. Renowned fortune 500 trainers Jim Bagnola (2017) says when tempting Generation Y and younger employees, one should not tell, but tell to be done in the form of a question. Therefore, he said that “don’t tell ask questions.” He implicates that today’s generation is reluctant to respond if the request sounded like a command. Hence, managers are challenged by today’s workforce to generate greater productivity to meet the operational demands of their competitive businesses. As discussed earlier, today’s workforce has a pre-determined idea of what they want to achieve. Managers are expected to provide every possible way to motivate them. To balance the dichotomy, the concept of nudging is practical.
The word nudging triggers a picture of a mother elephant gently pushing the baby elephant from the river bank to the top of the levee. Nobel laureate Richard Thaler described this, which is required for human engagement to achieve the intended outcome. He further defines nudging as “… altering people’s behavior predictably without significantly changing their economic incentives” Some others can visualize how a slight push on a piece of domino can have an impact on more considerable change. Hence nudging is all about minor stimulation for a substantial change or outcome. One even could compare nudging with Pareto’s 20% change for 80% impact. Nudging does not expect aggressiveness; it is always implicit or subtle. It achieves outcome either by shifting the environment for the desired result or changing the recipient’s mindset tacitly to conform to the need. Therefore, nudging can be a compelling concept for human engagement.
The person who is nudging is expected to be mindful hence requires thoughtfulness and planning. Accordingly, the practitioner of nudging has to master the skill. There are four points one needs to consider when using nudging as a tool for human engagement;
- Mindful nudges guide employees to a more controlled stage
- Mindless nudges use the emotions or framing to sway decisions that people make
- Encouraging nudges facilitate implementation or continuation of a particular behavior
- Discouraging nudges hinder or prevent behavior that is believed to be undesirable
With this in mind, one needs to consider employee engagement as a planned process by defining goals, critically understanding the respective users, designing the required nudge, and, once implemented, tracking the behavior from then to now. This approach can be adapted to stages of behavior change articulated by Grimley (1997) and Prochaska (1992), discussing pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance.
As nudging expects a change, the next challenge is how to implement sustainable change. The Penguin story will be appropriate to understand the nuance of this aspect; hence will be discussed. Three new penguins were received by a particular state zoo in the US from another zoo by mistake. These three penguins were different from the twenty-six penguins of the zoo that are keen to have a good time, unlike the regular zoo penguins. They play and have fun from morning till evening while the remaining twenty-six stay gloomily in their cages. Three new penguins did not bother about others. They continued to have fun for some period where, one day, the zookeeper reported that the zoo had become a significant attraction towards the area of penguins. After some time, twenty-nine penguins had a good time which has taken the interest of the visitors. This phenomenon has been analyzed and identified that the change is possible if it is novel – fun behavior of penguins, visible – where all can see and sustainable – were running for a reasonable period. This story tells a profound management concept with regards to behavior and attitude change of humans in organizations.
Marketing is all about creating the craving while nudging facilitates the follow-through. Nudging in that context involves creating new habits as many human behaviors are a function of our ingrained habits. At the heart of behavioral economics is the idea that we are not always rational beings. In this context, writers do not expect to focus on provoking human engagement instead of exploring ways to nudge people to perform as expected. Writers believe that it is worthwhile to explore this domain further as there are multiple ways to influence humans tacitly at an unconscious level to change the human engagement in a given context.
Dr. Ravi Bamunusinghe and Dr. Samantha Rathnayake