Éric Singler is Managing Director of the BVA group, in charge of the BVA Nudge Unit. He is the author of several books, including Nudge Management. His teams have worked on Bridge, the future Orange headquarters, and on residential buildings. He explains how office design influences employee behaviour.
Éric Singler
How high is the 'morale' of French employees today?
The Gallup polling institute has been monitoring employee engagement levels around the world for several years. The results are generally poor, but with a special mention for France: only 6 % of employees are engaged at workIn France, a fifth of employees say they are "disengaged", while the majority are "non-engaged" (= detached from their work). There is a real gulf between the rhetoric about attention to well-being put forward by some CEOs and the reality experienced by employees.
So how do you create commitment? Contrary to what thehomo economicus has long led us to believe - especially in the land of Descartes - that man is not a rational being. The carrot and the stick are not his main prods. More than 40 years of experimentation and research in the behavioural sciences (including Nobel Prize winners such as Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler) have profoundly renewed our vision: we are complex beings, eminently social and emotional, influenced by cognitive biases and the surrounding context. Commitment involves a mixture of interest, recognition, autonomy, control, fulfilment at work, belonging to a group, but also camaraderie. Of the 12 criteria tested by Gallup, having friends in the organisation is the most correlated with loyalty to it. So it's a very subtle combination that will give meaning to your job and create commitment.
There is almost a correlation between the number of friends you have and your loyalty to your employer.
This general disengagement is paradoxical at a time when there is much talk of transforming organisations...
Transformation is a daunting challenge because humans don't like change. This is known as the "change bias". status quo ". We feel comfortable with what is familiar, whereas change generates stress. This bias is coupled with a second one that is formidable for any transformation: loss aversion. This is a natural, non-conscious tendency to react very negatively to anything that can be perceived as a loss compared to the current situation. The combination of the two explains the results measured by McKinsey: 70% of transformation plans are failures. It's not enough simply to inform, explain and convince. Above all, we need to inspire, involve, support and combat fears by highlighting individual benefits.
What we need is what Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson calls the " psychological safety ". If you want committed employees, you need an ecosystem (physical and mental) where you feel psychologically safe. The flex-office Savage is an example of everything you shouldn't do: it's constant change, and we realise that many employees end up settling in the same place. We need points of reference and continuity.
In response to this, you are proposing an approach based on behavioural economics, known as "nudge"? What does this involve?
Le nudge (is an approach that has revolutionised the world of public policy and is beginning to reach the most innovative companies, such as Google. It aims to design environments that encourage the adoption of new individual and collective behaviours (innovating, learning, communicating, etc.). The approach is based on an in-depth understanding of the factors that influence human behaviour: we are irrational, but our irrationality is predictable when we know the biases that motivate our decisions. For example: Why is there obesity? Why are there still so many smokers when we know the harmful effects on health? This is what we call the "present time bias": we prefer an immediate advantage to a long-term gain.
The nudge (...) is used to transform behaviour A into behaviour B. It modifies the environment (...) to influence the choices available.
In practical terms, how does nudge work in the workplace?
We have moved from an economy of mass production (Ford, Taylor...), where processes are key, to a knowledge-based economy in which the intelligence of each individual is paramount. Taylorism and processes are very effective for repetitive tasks, but when it comes to stimulating intelligence or solving a problem, the absence of commitment is a killer. So we need to create the conditions for this commitment, create desire, encounters, surprises... In this respect, the physical environment is a lever for transformation. For Bridge d'Orange, for example, the physical space is designed to encourage cooperation and encounters between employees.
Everything counts: materials, colours, smells, sounds, traffic flows, furniture... There are universal 'rules'. For example, contact with nature creates well-being, round tables in a creative or meeting room reduce the risk of conflict (as opposed to rectangular tables), etc. Visit open spaces are as much machines for communication as they are places for interruption and loss of concentration. When you are interrupted for 30 seconds, it takes an average of 15 minutes to regain your previous level of concentration. So if you're planning to install open spacesIn addition to these universal rules, it is essential to observe the practices within a company in order to adapt them to its practices and objectives. But beyond these universal rules, it is essential to observe the practices within a company to adapt to its practices and objectives.
Of course, the physical environment isn't everything. It's all very well to put a table football in the entrance hall, but you need "mental authorisation", you need managers to play so that employees feel authorised to do so. In the same way, if you make floor cafeterias available, that's all very well, but if your manager says to you afterwards, "Are you still messing about? That's the psychological environment.
Éric Singler, CEO of BVA
Laurie Santos, Professor at Yale, has shown that it is less the salary in absolute terms that matters (= how much you earn), than the way you see yourself in relation to your friends and colleagues. A study conducted by Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton in the United States concluded that above an annual income of 75,000 dollars, the correlation between money and happiness is weak. This is because this sum is sufficient to meet most needs (emotional and physical well-being, leisure activities). Beyond that, the gain is limited.
