Want your Employee Pulse Program to be Successful? Start with Habits

Employee pulse surveys can be an effective tool to stay informed and act purposefully to improve your employees’ everyday experiences. Unfortunately, most use it ineffectively and unsustainably.

Over the past ten years, our team at Perked! has been helping companies implement employee pulse programs so leaders can continuously listen to, learn from, and act on their employees’ feedback. During this time, we’ve learnt what makes employee pulse programs sustainable and effective in creating positive change to your workplace culture.

It boils down to the science of forming new habits.

Let’s start with a quick understanding of the behavioral psychology behind habit formation. Next, we’ll talk about the levers you can influence to create good habits. Lastly, we’ll apply the science behind habit formation to building a successful employee pulse program.

1.  Science of Habits

James Clear, author of New York Times bestseller Atomic Habits, presents a helpful framework to understanding what a habit is, how it works, and how to strengthen good habits.

Fundamentally, there are four stages of a “habit loop”:

1. Cue triggers your brain to activate a behavior. This can be the smell of fresh bread coming from your local bakery as you walk down the street.
2. Craving is the motivational force behind every habit. It gives the “cue” meaning based on the thoughts and feelings of the observer. For example, where the cue is the smell of fresh bread, the craving is the desire to not feel hungry. 
3. Response is the actual habit you perform. That could be walking into the bakery and buying a chocolate croissant. Whether this behavior occurs or not depends on how motivated you are and how much effort or friction is associated with the behavior. 
4. Reward is the end goal of every habit. We desire the reward because they satisfy us, as well as teach us which actions are worth repeating in the future. Eating the chocolate croissant satisfies your hunger, making you feel happy.

In summary, the cue triggers a craving, which motivates a response, which ultimately provides a reward. These steps create a neurological feedback loop that allows you to form repeated behaviors aka “habits”.

Reference: “Clear J, How to Start New Habits That Actually Stick, accessed Nov 15, 2023”

2.  Applying the Science to Create New Habits

In order for a behavior to become a habit (repeated loop), each of the four stages above has to be strong enough. To boost their strength, there are levers you can pull at each stage of the habit loop. James Clear refers to this as the “Four Laws of Behaviour Change”:

In other words, when working on effectively implementing a new habit, you should be asking yourself:

1.   How can I make it obvious?
2.   How can I make it attractive?
3.   How can I make it easy?
4.   How can I make it satisfying?

3.  Pulling the Right Levers in Designing your Employee Pulse Program

An effective employee pulse program is about purposefully forming a habit within two groups of individuals:

A.  Employees

B.  Leaders and/or Managers

That’s because the habit loop of employees is intertwined with the habit loop of their leaders and/or managers. 

4.  How Perked! can help you build an effective employee feedback habit loop with our Employee Pulse Program

At Perked!, we’ve designed our employee pulse program to help you build and sustain the employee feedback habit loop. Here are a few things we do: