Design custom tactics

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You'll often note that some behaviors are reinforced as part of your organization's unique culture. You can design specific custom tactics to drive change in your organization with the following approach:

1. Problem - What is preventing us from doing our best work?
2. Root cause - Why does this behavior happen?
3. Target behavior - What can we do?
4. Barrier - Why won't we do it?
5. Custom tactics - How can we ensure that we do it?

1. Define the problem

Before developing tactics to drive change, it's important to define the problem. Common problems that impede work performance and are measurable with Viva Insights include:

• Poor meeting culture
• Inadequate manager coaching
• Siloed communication
• Lack of empowered employees
• Excessive after-hours collaboration

By using your own Viva Insights data and employee feedback, you can prioritize the top problems across your organization.

2. Identify the root cause

The outcome you want is often unachievable without first identifying the root cause. If you identify that your organization has poor meeting culture, it's valuable to keep asking why until you get to an addressable root cause.

3. Define the target behaviors

After you've identified the root cause you can begin to identify specific behaviors that individuals will need to start doing.

In some cases, you might have an exhaustive list of target behaviors but find a need to prioritize due to the risk of overwhelming people or limited resources to drive the change. In either case you can use the following to prioritize target behaviors:

• Behavioral Impact - How likely is it that adoption of the target behavior will result in a change to our root cause?
• Likelihood of changing behavior - How likely is it that we can get employees to adopt this new behavior?

Here's an example of what it looks like to prioritize your target behaviors. Your results will vary and be determined by your organization's culture.

4. Identify barriers to change

As humans we are generally change averse, or we need a compelling reason to want to break from our status quo. Discovering the barriers which employees see to changing behavior can provide specific targets to address. When thinking about barriers, think not only about physical blockers but also mental barriers such as a fear of repercussions or acting a certain way to appease all stakeholders.

It's possible to be proactive in addressing barriers to change and identify common challenges that individuals face. To be proactive, you can use the following barrier checklist to get started. The bold words refer to our target behavior and each question helps identify whether individuals have the capability, motivation, and environment to reinforce change.

Question	Likelihood to be a barrier
Do people know about meeting agendas?
Do people know how to send meeting agendas?
Do people forget to send meeting agendas?	✓
Is it difficult for people to send meeting agendas?
Do people believe that meeting agendas will solve the problem?	✓
Do people believe that other consequences will occur from using meeting agendas?
Do incentives discourage sending meeting agendas?
Do people want to send meeting agendas?	✓
Do people have the resources to send meeting agendas?	✓
Does social pressure make it difficult to send meeting agendas?

5. Design custom tactics

After identifying the top barriers to change, the next step is to develop custom tactics to address these barriers. Causes of behavior and barriers to change vary depending on culture; the feedback you collect, and your organizational knowledge to develop tailored solutions. Here's an example of what it looks like to create custom tactics to address the previously identified barriers.

In some cases, you might develop quite a few tactics that you'd like to prioritize. You can do that with these questions:

• How likely is it that the goal will be achieved by implementing this tactic?
• How easy is it to implement?

What are co-creation workshops?

At times, it might be challenging to identify the barriers to change and appropriate change tactics on your own. It can be beneficial to invite change champions (those who are most eager about the change campaign) and individuals who represent the target population to a workshop to help co-create change solutions. In a co-creation workshop, the facilitator ensures that all ideas are heard, asks questions when the group is stuck, and encourages the group to get as many ideas out as possible. After generating a lot of great ideas, groups can prioritize their top barriers and change tactics and take these ideas back to their teams for execution.