Peter and a co-host argue that praising employees for doing things right builds better culture than punishing mistakes. When a phishing test showed 95% of staff passed, they highlighted the failures instead of the wins, demoralizing the majority. Catch people doing right, and they'll keep doing it.
Chapters
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Naked Insider. Today's discussion is something bit different.
Absolutely.
We're actually looking at organization culture, and the topic of the discussion is catching people doing the right thing.
Absolutely.
That's very unusual.
Yes, absolutely. Because normally you catch people doing the wrong thing.
Wrong thing, yes. So explain to everyone who's watching what exactly that means.
So the concept some of you may recognize from the one minute manager, but it's just one of the more powerful things that you can do. And we're now looking at that in terms of culture and the security of your individuals inside of the organization that you have. And very simply put, you get what you focus on. And if you're focusing on the positive aspects, you will always find that the positive aspects tend to become more reinforced and more prevalent in your organization. So that's it, essentially, in a nutshell.
Yeah, very much so, yes. So let's run a very simple example. So most organizations would run some form of, for example, a phishing test to test whether their employees are vigilant and aware about emails that they receive and whether they're, you know, tested whether they actually notice that maybe the links or attachments should be not clicked or not. So you test for their response and so forth. And typically with most organizations, when they get the results, they look at the percentage of people that have done the wrong thing. Yep.
And literally. So, for instance, if you have 10% of people that do the wrong thing by focusing on that 10% and saying, we now need to get that down to 5% or whatever it is you're actually highlighting and promoting, you're almost advertising the negative and disenfranchising those 90% of people who did the right thing. They're going, well, that's fine, but I did the right thing. Correct. So that's a very powerful way of doing things.
Yeah. So I just think that, and I'll probably just reiterate that, you know, imagine if it was flipped, that now you could say, well, 90% of the organizations are doing the right thing. And now how do we increase that percentage up?
Yes, absolutely. And that's a way different proposition to the alternative.
Correct? Correct. So when we talked about catching people doing the right thing, Another similar example is when we talk about cyber awareness. So just because most people are aware doesn't mean that they care. And so what happens, you have what we call is a gap between what we perceive as a behavior to where you want to be. So the question is, if you berate a person. Yes.
You're actually negatively rewarding that behavior.
Correct. So what's the likelihood of them actually going from being aware to care?
Very low. Very low.
So there's a good thing for you to realize that if you want to reach and help people to do the right thing. So in essence what you want to do is shape people's behavior so that they act in the best interest. So your mission is really to catch them doing the right thing.
The side effect of that too is that you're not just talking to the one individual. That individual has connections, whether that's somebody sitting next to them or the person that they're going to be talking to over a coffee table. That positive reinforcement does not stop with just that one person. It actually permeates through large parts of the organization.
Correct. So that was my leading question. Thanks for answering. But let me take it a step further. What happens to the organization? What happens to the person? Also that gets reinforced with positivity.
You mentioned before the word care. So there's knowledge and there's care. So I know what the right thing to do, but whether I do it or not depends on how much I care.
Correct.
Now with positive reinforcement, I care a lot because I've been shown that that is a valued part of the organization. So it increases my care factor to adhere to the correctness of the policy which is. Or to the behaviour. And that then also shows other people that this is the way we do things in this organization.
So the question is, why is it so important? Why is catching people doing the right thing so important to their organization?
It is a way of increasing the engagement of your individuals. Whether it's a way of increasing the pride in the organization and it's a way of increasing attention to detail which invariably will translate into the productivity or the bottom line of the organisation.
Yeah. And I think the sort of high level perspective of if, if we had that taking place. So the end result for an organization is they have greater morale, the culture is being supported, business performance is being achieved and the goals and its mission are much easier to, to reach because basically got the people corralled into a.
Single, into a single mindset. Which is correct.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So question. Organizations start.
They start on a grassroots level. It starts on people catching each other, doing things. Right. And then obviously it needs to move up into the higher and higher management stratas, whether it's supervisor, whether it's management level and make it a point. Because by being able to do that you also then earn the trust of the employee to be able to say, well actually, you know, you did all these things. Great. Now, what I'd like you to do is concentrate on this and see that you can do the same thing.
Correct.
And people will be much more open to addressing things that they need to address.
Excellent. Excellent. I was going to ask you a good question in terms of. Organizations can also start in different layers so they don't have to wait for management or culture to support them.
Yes. It can be the person sitting next to you, correct? Yeah. It could be the person making the coffee. Gee, you made that coffee really great.
Good. Now, so what was that thing that you were just mentioning about the forest and the echo or the echo. What was the analogy of that one?
What you shout into the forest comes back out. Comes back out.
Yeah. Which is. It means a lot. So if you put negativity out, that's what you get.
That's right.
And vice versa.
Yes.
Okay. So with that, we're done.
Fantastic.
Next video.
Working remotely.
Working from home. Working remotely. And the behaviors associated and the risks associated with it. I mean, we tend to talk a lot about system risk, but very few talk about the risk of behavior and the effect and the impact it's had with working from home. So stay in tune with that, because that's going to be a real exciting and an interesting topic. So thank you and see you next time. Thanks, Peter, again.
