Five tips to creating new habits

I used to have an employee called Tim, who would dash over to a customer’s site the moment they had a problem and fix it for them. Great customer service!

Unfortunately, it was terrible customer service for the other clients whose sites he was supposed to be at. Saying “yes” to the urgent support request was a bad habit that Tim couldn’t seem to break. What we wanted him to do was to refer the support request to our Operations Manager for scheduling. When I spoke to a psychologist friend about how to form new habits, his answer was just “repetition”.

Repetition? Not good enough I thought, and have consequently been mulling this over for the last 15 years or so. Interestingly, the answers I have come up with so far came from sports coaches, not psychologists. So here are the five tips I have so far for creating new habits.

Do some planning

You need to carefully understand what your objective is and break it down into its subcomponents or stages. If you want to ride a bike 200km a week, start off with riding to work every day as the first stage. If you want an employee to refer support requests to someone else for scheduling, perhaps start off with them having to learn a standard response to requests.

Provide feedback plus the old “carrot and stick”

You need to provide feedback and immediate rewards and/or punishments to change the way you see the habit. Having a chart that you tick off accomplishments with a reward is a great thing to do, perhaps a tick for every day you ride your bike and going out for breakfast on Sundays if you do it ever day.

If you want an employee to refer support calls to someone who schedules the support, make sure it’s a metric that’s reported on in weekly meetings and offer gift vouchers when certain levels are reached.

Create physical solutions

Physical solutions or “hard systems” make it easier to “just do it” than to stay with your bad old ways. If you wanted to ride your bike everyday, you could have your bike situated so it blocks access to your house. You then have to go around the bike if you don’t intend to ride it.

For an employee who you wanted to refer support calls, you could have a large reminder on the front of his diary, and perhaps not have his mobile phone number on his business card.

Lie to yourself

According to my friend the sports coach, it’s easier to get motivated to do two minutes a day on an exercise bike than half an hour. So lie to yourself when you jump on the bike and say you will do just five minutes, because dragging out five minutes to half an hour on the bike is much easier than going from zero to 30 minutes.

For an employee you want to refer calls, get them to put back every support call by at least 24 hours. Going from “I will do it tomorrow” to “I can’t schedule support calls” is much easier than going from saying yes, to saying no.

Have black and white rules

Apparently if you have complex rules such as “it’s okay not to ride to work if I have had a big night”, it’s easy to feel lousy and convince yourself that you kind of had a big night. Simple, or black and white rules such as “I ride to work every day regardless” are hard to break.

In a work environment, “only accept support requests if it a customer emergency” is easy to fudge. You can always rationalise why there is an emergency. However, “you are not allowed to schedule support calls full stop” makes those rules much harder to break.

So 15 years and this is what I have come up with so far. I’d be grateful for any other tips though as I think that it’s not just my employees that need to develop some better habits.

Brendan Lewis is a serial technology entrepreneur having founded: Ideas Lighting, Carradale Media, Edion, Verve IT, The Churchill Club and Flinders Pacific. He has set up businesses for others in Romania, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Vietnam and is the sole Australian representative of the City of London for Foreign Direct Investment. Qualified in IT and Accounting, he has also spent time running an Advertising agency and as a Cavalry Officer with the Australian Army Reserve.