The Recognition Factor: Transforming Workplace Culture | A Scratchie Podcast

Learning & Recognition: Rethinking Workplace Behavior with Paul Matthews | Episode 12

• Scratchie • Season 1 • Episode 12

Share episode

Can recognising good behaviour be more powerful than training? In this episode, learning and development expert Paul Matthews shares groundbreaking insights on why many safety training programs fall short and how positive reinforcement can transform workplace behaviour.

Paul, CEO of People Alchemy and author of multiple books on learning transfer, draws on his extensive background in engineering and L&D to explain why traditional approaches to safety training often fail to create lasting change. Using his powerful SAT NAV analogy, he breaks down the four critical elements needed for successful behavioral change: knowing your starting point, defining clear objectives, creating step-by-step guidance, and maintaining accountability.

Listen in as Paul and James explore:
- Why distinguishing between skill acquisition and skill maintenance is crucial for safety programs
- How immediate rewards tap into powerful behavioral drivers that overcome "future discounting"
- A fascinating case study of how tire fitters transformed their safety culture through peer observation
- The vital differences between compliance-based training and true behavioral change

Key Topics:
00:00 Introduction and Paul's background
08:40 The SAT NAV analogy for learning journeys
15:30 Skill acquisition vs maintenance in safety
23:45 Present vs future benefits in motivation
31:20 Case study: Transforming safety culture
42:10 Practical implementation strategies

Resources Mentioned:
- People Alchemy: www.peoplealchemy.com
- Learning Transfer at Work (Book by Paul Matthews)
- Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve research

Ready to transform your workplace culture through instant recognition? Visit https://www.scratchie.com/book-a-demo to learn how Scratchie can help you build a more engaged and safer workforce.

Ready to take the next step? Visit https://www.scratchie.com/book-a-demo to see how Scratchie can help you recognise and reward safe behaviour on your projects. The future of construction safety starts here.

So Paul Matthews, welcome. It's great to have just a short intro, the founder, CEO and learning and development expert, and the CEO of, sorry, of People Alchemy and Kiwi living in the UK. Yeah, so it's great to have you on. I really appreciate that. Should we kick off? I'd love to hear a bit about your background from the... from the start in New Zealand as a kid, what got you interested in learning? God. No, well, I certainly wasn't interested in learning back then. was a simple farm boy messing about. Yeah, I learned at school, you know, and I was keen on reading and learning and all of those things. But I certainly didn't see myself going into a learning and development career, even if I'd known what the heck that was. Yes. But engineering, suppose, was where I was headed. Even though I came off a sheep farm, I was much more interested in the machinery than looking after six sheep. Right. so you, were always into the engineering, into the machinery piece. That was, that was all your bent, was it? Yeah, probably more than livestock, yeah. And is that what you, so you pursued that side of things. You went long into engineering. Yeah, Long story short, but yes, ended up after some time getting an engineering degree and staying to some extent in agriculture because I specialized in agricultural engineering and ended up working with an outfit designing farm machinery and things like that, which was fascinating. So I kind of joined everything together there. right, and your path sort of led you to South America from my research. that, you know? yeah. my parents are actually born over there. So it was always something I wanted to visit and travel was always one. You know, when you're a kid, some kids want to be a fireman, some want to be a jet fighter pilot like my brother did, and others want to be this. And I remember asking my parents some time back when they were still alive, you know, what that I always want to be when I grew up and because I'd forgotten. And they said, well, nothing really. But you always talked about traveling. So that was And that eventually happened and South America was always on the list because of my family roots there and I still had relations there. So yeah, I spent a fair bit of time wandering around there, which is fascinating. and whereabouts in particular. Pretty much all of it. I over a year there, I suppose, in total time on more than one visit, backpacking around lots of different places. And did you weave in any of your engineering or anything like that? Or is it was really sort of find yourself kind of travel for, you know. it was a find yourself kind of travel or find other things. I'm not sure I was looking to find myself, but I was just intrigued with everything that was out there. But one of the things that I that was quite startling is I was on a bus and I think it was Ecuador from memory. I can't remember. driving past a farm machinery lot of used farm machinery in one of the seed drills I had designed when I was back in New Zealand many years earlier was sitting there in the the secondhand machinery lot by the side of the road. Yeah. Did you feel a bit old at that point when you saw something you'd... I startled more than anything else. And then I coughed, remembered we were sending containerfuls of the seed drills to South America over many years, and I was there. It was one of our export markets. So what reflection, probably not that surprising, but that it was still there and usable. I mean, that was pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's true. And so, and then you came back to New Zealand and... Yeah, by that time I'd kind of left New Zealand and I've obviously been back on quite a few occasions to visit family and mess around but never really lived there again. Lived in different parts of the world and probably more in the UK than anywhere else. And how did engineering, so you went engineering, how did that morph into learning and development L &D? I've often got some interesting things. I couldn't get a real job. So I ended up in L and D, but I don't think that's really fair on the L and D community. I, it was more by accident because I was working with an organization, as a sort of a service manager and what have you. And this was an electronics stuff. so still engineering up to a point, and managing some reasonable size teams in that, in that business. And. One of the things that we did was send them off to various training courses with big training companies and the very traditional way that was happening in the sort of the late 90s timeframe, I suppose it was. And one of the people I sent on a course, they messed it up really badly. He ended up in the wrong city and couldn't attend the course because he'd got bad joining instructions. Mm-hmm. this company came back to me and said, well, we'll give you a free course for somebody. And then a little while later, I was at a point where I'd left that company, but I hadn't yet told this training company I'd left. I went and took this free course myself because I said, you owe me one. yeah, we remember that. And they gave me a, so I just went on a management skills course, which was really interesting. And. And on the second day at lunchtime, the guy running the course said, come and have lunch with me. So I did. And we sat and he said, what are you doing here? So, and I explained that I was now sort of, you know, out of harness and looking around thinking what do I do next? And he said, well, why don't you become a trainer? So that was what got me into L &D, strangely enough. And I went and worked with that training company as a trainer for a while. Yep. part-time, but went through their train the trainer course. And that was the days when there were, you you'd be given 200 acetate slides for an overhead projector for, you know, for a four day course and bow your way through this curriculum with a bunch of people, some of whom wanted to be there, many of them not. And it was... how many people in these courses? Usually 20 in a cohort. And then you ended up getting a bonus if you got a good happy sheet at the end of it, which was completely irrelevant to whether it was a good course or not. But of course, the training company was interested in people going back and saying that was a wonderful course because then they might well sell some more units. But there was just nothing we were doing at all in terms of what these people were going to do afterwards, how they were going to use it, you know, other than just saying, you know, you'd ask a few questions during the course, but mostly it was a, you know, pump and dump, you know, sort of push the content at them and ask them, do they understand that model of management or team or whatever? But very little about how they were going to use it. And so how did that feel? was, I must've felt unfulfilling as a trainer to... Well, it was interesting and fulfilling in the fact that I was doing something new and it was interesting and fascinating, but I wasn't really at that stage really thinking much about the afterwards. I was thinking, well, this is how it's done. They've taught me, you know, the current methodology and I was delivering it. And it was kind of fun being the sage on the stage and saying to people, I know everything and you know nothing. You know, I'm going to tell you the way the world should work. Yep. yeah, there's a certain amount of glory in that, suppose. But I look back now and horror what I was doing. and, and I think it was after that and sometime later where I was doing some more training, you know, on my own account and people were saying the workbook you gave me is great. It's the only one I keep on my desk. Hmm. I put a lot of effort into those. And then I started to realize actually what they want is ongoing support. It's kind of information. It's help as they need it in the real time rather than being put in the classroom for a week. And because that was the days where a week's training was not unusual. And of course, it's a huge amount of information and overwhelming. And most people remembered so little of it. And then, of course, I came across the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve. And that's when I started to think, bloody hell, this is broken. You know, there's something not right here. And that's kind of when my engineering mind kicked in and said, well, hang on. If I was an engineer doing this with this obvious rate of failure, you know, I'd be killing my customers. and that's not good. So that, that's when I started to think about training as something that was broken in the way it was being delivered back then. And in the way that I was being told was the right way to deliver it. said, no, this, this isn't right. Hmm. This is not achieving much. This is not returning on the investment that people are putting in it. Not always, but more often than not, there was a failure of something. Fire of outputs. It was that. Yeah, well, it, wasn't necessarily helping the people who are on the course be better or get their jobs done easier. It was filling their head full of a bunch of things. And then later on they'd be sitting there thinking, perhaps I should be using that funny team model that I was taught. I can't remember it. What the hell. then they just go back to what they used to do. so I simply couldn't apply the models that, okay, got it. ongoing, there was no kind of practice it. Now that could just simply be because at that stage, that's how I was taught as a trainer by that training company. And that was the way most people were doing it. But what I have found since there were people back in that day, chap called Guy Wallace in the States, for example, who's been posting on LinkedIn a lot recently about his experience. Yes. And he was a lot further ahead in terms of figuring a lot of this stuff out based on some of the mentors he had. So it's not that those ideas or the better ideas were not there. It's just that we're very, very thinly spread back in the nineties and early two thousands. So, but anyway, I didn't know that at the time. So I started looking at different stuff and ended up writing some books in the learning and development space, partly just cause I said, hang on, there's something wrong. How can I reach a lot of people quickly with. you know, some decent ideas. And so that sort of got me researching. Sorry. what, would you, how would you sort of characterize the, the change, the difference between, you know, learning that, results in sort of little recall and little application to the problems that these people who were supposed to have been taught something deal with every day and what you do now, what was the, what's the Delta? It's been a torturous journey as all of these things usually are to get from, you know, where I was, which is, you know, that traditional training model through to, well, what are we really trying to achieve here? So I suppose I went back to some of my early sort of engineering design principles that I learned, you know, my engineering degree is figure out what the outcome is first and start from there and work backwards. And a lot of that was you know, talking to people who are going to use a bit of farm machinery, for example, well, what are you going to use it for? How are you going to use it? You know, what tractor are you going to use to pull it with? How many horsepowers has that got? And really get into some of the detail of what's really needed here. And then realize that some people are going to use it in stupid ways. So you better beef up the strength because they're going to use a chisel plow to pull out tree stumps with, and that's not what it's designed for, but you could use it for that. But of course, it's got to be a lot. meaty a bit of equipment to pull a stump out, not break. So it's that kind of thinking that got me into looking at, what is our outcome when we're training? And I soon realized the outcome wasn't to deliver a course to people with a set curriculum and then get a five out of five happy sheet score at the end of it. That was a stupid outcome, but that's the outcome that most people were kind of working towards in the training. Mm-hmm. organizationally and otherwise. And organizational learning, I'm not talking about education, school and things. That's a different debate and that's broken as well, but that's another story. So that got me thinking, well, what is the... in terms of soft skills you know management leadership that sort of stuff is that what you're talking about or or is it also okay computer programming to and yes, all the soft skills to feedback skills, courageous conversations, leadership, whatever you want to call it, you know, through to specifics about how to use this computer controlled lathe. You know, how to how to how to drive this digger on a construction site safely, how to all of those sorts of things. There's a whole gamut of stuff. And I started to think, well, what is the goal of this training really? And soon started to realize, albeit slowly, you know, it takes a while to get into this thick skull. We want people doing things the way we want them to do them rather than the way they're doing them right now. Cause otherwise I wouldn't be thinking about training. So the first indicator that the first time that training comes up in the conversation is when people aren't doing things the way you want them to do them. okay. Because it sounds like a kind of a truism at first blush, but yeah, right. It's interesting. So the only reason we're even talking about training is cause this group of people is not doing things the way we want them to do them. Or possibly because we don't think they're capable of doing things the way we want them to do them in six months time when that new software system kicks in or that new bit of machinery arrives on site or whatever. Yeah. so there might be a future pacing view in that, but basically it's about people. They're not doing things the way we want them to do them. So, well, okay, why not? And the typical default reaction is, well, they don't know how, so let's train them how. Now that may or may not be true, but then as soon as I think about, well, let's train them how to use this or how to do that or how to be a leader or how to have a courageous conversation or how to program this sort of thing in Python or, you know, PHP or whatever. Then you think, well, actually, what are all the things they need to know to do that? And then it defaults into a curriculum based delivery of knowledge rather than thinking, how do I help them do things the way we want them to do them? In other words, what's that future set of behaviors that I want them to be doing and exhibiting consistently when our program is done. So when our initiative, whatever that is, finished. Yes. that set of things I want them to be doing? And how would I know they're doing that? So what would I see or hear or feel? What would be my direct sensory evidence criteria that they are now doing those things and doing them habitually, doing them just because that's the way we do them, doing them in a sustainable way that's fully embedded into how they do their job so that we no longer ever in the future have the same conversation again about Cause too often you give them training and then a year later you're exactly the same conversation. They're not doing what I want them to do. And they're still doing, you know, so we've completely failed. and how many times have I or you seen people sent off to the same training course every year, you know, in, in sort of in May to go and do the same training course. Cause we do that course in May and it's almost the same team doing it every year and somehow maybe one or two new members, but by and large, they're just skinned off to the same training over and over and over again. Something wrong here, you know? So yeah, that's. of, taking an end, so starting at the end and defining what good looks like. And then, so working back from the end as opposed to. chunking it up into various skills that becomes a syllabus that you train. So starting at the end. So how do you develop a course from that end point? Once you've defined what good looks like, how do you work back from there? Well, defining what goods looks, good looks like is actually the better place to start. And one of the ways I characterized it in one of the books I wrote on learning transfer, in other words, transfer of learning from a training course into, you know, operations, is most trainers started, if they were writing a book or reading a book, they start at chapter three and then they finish at chapter six when there were 10 chapters in the book. they, most people in the training fraternity still don't do the stuff right at the beginning they should be doing and don't do the stuff right at the end they should be doing. They do some stuff in the middle, often really quite well. But because they don't do the beginning bit, the stuff in the middle are doing well, is they're doing the wrong thing well. Because they haven't got the first bits and that's, you're quite right. You need to start with that end in mind. I did a podcast recently for an outfit here in the UK. They said, what's your... biggest kind of problem with L and D. What, you know, we want you to rant, you know, get on with it, have a good rant. And I just said, lack of clarity of the outcome is the root of all evil in L and D. and, and so it is, you're quite right. It's starting with the end point. So given they're not doing right now what we want them to do, that's the start point. Some managers said they're not doing what I want them to do. Okay. Now let's have a conversation on what you want them to do instead. Yeah. And then if you want them to do those things instead consistently and embedded, they're gonna, and a lot of that will be a skill. be, need to acquire the skill in some way. And in order, and then once you've got those skills, then they'll be able to go and exhibit those behaviors that we want regularly and consistently. And so does that mean it becomes a much more bespoke affair? Because if you're starting at the end, you know, you're establishing what good looks like, and then you're sort of looking at what what your student where they're at, where they're lacking, some would be lacking in some skills, others would be lacking in other skills. Some might be completely motivation. related, some might be fully motivated, but have no idea. So it does that mean that you start to sort of do one to one kind of training? How could you train many people? no, that's interesting. I mean, if you're scaling to a company with 40, 50,000 people, you're not going to be able to do that. if you've got a little small group, maybe you can. I'm not advocating necessarily doing individual stuff for individual people, although in the way you deliver a program, there are ways to do that. That works really well. So you do get a customized learning program for each learner, but not by changing the content. and the process of that course, it's by the way you deliver it at the point of reception that you can make that change. I can come back onto that in a minute, but if we start at the front end, which is what I tend to call a behavioral needs analysis. So never ever start with a learning or training needs analysis, because you're automatically assuming there there's going to be training or learning that'll be needed. So start first with a behavioral need. What is the set of behaviors that we want to come out the other end of this? In other words, Mr. Manager or Mrs. what set of behaviors do you want to see that'll make you happy that we don't have to have this conversation ever again about these particular set of behaviors? What are they? Let's define them and let's talk about what you will see or hear or feel or notice when those behaviors are there. And that may be directly observing the behavior or it may be some first or second order result of that behavior being exhibited. What is a behavior as opposed to a skill? is an observable action. That's in its simplest sort of definition. So someone is doing something, it's observable. So that's how the psychologists or the behavioral economists and people like that will describe a behavior. This guy I have spoken at conferences with here in the UK around behaviors, and he's head of one of the big sort of behavioral. pieces of the government that does work with the UK government on general public behavior like smoking and overeating and all of those things. He's the one that is head of a whole unit that looks at how to nudge the population in certain directions. So that's all that, Phaler's work on nudge theory and all the rest of it. And his definition of a behavior, and this is the one he uses, an observable action. So what observable actions do we need to be taking place in the future? And it may be you can observe the action directly. It may be it's a way to write a report. So therefore, the observable thing that you can see is that finished report done in a specific way. So you don't see them writing the report, but you do see the result of that action. So it might be the action itself, or it might be like a first or second order result of that action occurring. So given you've got that result, that action must have occurred at somewhere prior to that result. So that's how you can define them. that's, and you've got to define them in observable terms like that. so it's a bit like a sat nav. If you know where you're starting from and you know where you're to get to the sat nav will help you understand how far along that journey you've got. So you need to be able to say, we were here and we want to go over there behaviorally. Say how much progress have we made from point A to point B? You don't know that until you've got somewhere observing whether that behavior is starting to occur. or already occurring and so on. So you need that yardstick to measure. And one of the neat questions you can ask someone is when they are helping you define the evidence criteria for those behaviors occurring is, okay, if we were 100 % successful with our initiative, whatever that happens to be, what would you see here or feel that would give you comfort that we're 100 % successful? Now, if we were only 50 % successful, How would that be different? What would you see instead? And that makes them start thinking about those measures in a more granular or graduated fashion. So that's your behavioral definitions at the end. then, and you often have to look at the task of someone, you know, given this task, what behaviors or actions do they need to take to do that task effectively? And then you can say, okay, that's the set of behaviors we want. I've got them signed off with the client, with the customer, with the manager. but those are the behaviors they want. Now, how do we deliver those behaviors? Now there's your crunch question, not what curriculum do we deliver, but how do we deliver those behaviors? Now, given this cohort or this target group, on average, so create a persona in your mind, who are they? What are they looking for? What do they want? What's good for them? How do they want to do things? And then say, how do we take that group from where they are right now behaviorally? to the destination, the behavioral destination we want. How do we deliver those behaviors to that group? What would be the set of steps they would need to take over a period of time? Because you'll never deliver a behavior in an event. It will be a set of steps over time, which will involve practice, experimentation, reflection, some absorption of knowledge, and then practicing skills. So there's always going to be knowledge required, typically a little bit of new knowledge. There will be some practice required. and to get a skill up to a point where it's usable and adequate. And then those skills can be constructed together as actions that will then become the behaviors that you see in practice. So you've always got that knowledge, skills and behaviors to think about. What set of knowledge, skills and behaviors are we looking for that will mean we've got a success out of this training program? Right, okay, so the difference that we've just discussed is be very clear on what good looks like on a behavioral sense, what those end actions look like, understand where the student is at at the present time. So you have a clear view of the delta of the task in front of you and then deliver the teaching in a way that it results in that end goal that you're looking for. So it's almost deconstructing learning. taking away from the syllabus, because syllabus just is the latter. It's the sort of the non-thinking version of you need to... And it's deconstructing that and reassembling it. Yeah. Okay. And is it, is it reductionist to sort of give it a mnemonic or anything like that? Have you done that a framework like that or I use an analogy actually, and you got three out of the four critical success factors there in terms of what you said. So an analogy I use is a sat nav. You put Google on your phone or whatever sat nav you're using and there's four things that need to be in place for that sat nav to work. And other identical four things you need for that learning journey to work to cross that delta as you put it. the behavioral gap from where they are now to where you want them to be. So those four are, you've got to know where you are now. What's our current behavioral location? What's our current physical location for a sat nav? You've got to know where you are. If you don't know where you are, it's pretty impossible to figure out how you're to get someplace else. You've got to know where you want to get to. If you don't know where you want to get to, your sat nav's not going to work. So you've got to put a destination in there, whatever that destination is. You then need a set of step-by-step, that's the ladder you just described, a set of turn-by-turn instructions that fit, that's fit for purpose for getting you from point A to point B. So it's, you've got to have behaviorally a set of step-by-step actions to take over time that will get you reliably from your current behaviors to the behaviors you want instead. In other words, to that behavioral gap. And those step-by-step instructions are kind of the ladder or the scaffold that will help you do that. And then the fourth critical one is some way to hold people accountable for taking those actions and steps along the way from point A to point B. And the Sat Nav does that. If you go off route, the Sat Nav will say that the first opportunity, make a legal U-turn to get back on the route. Or it'll direct you around some side roads if you insist on not taking the main road because there's roadworks there. So the Sat Nav has built-in correction procedure that monitors your progress based on the criteria you've set for a destination. Again, notice how this is similar to having a behavioral destination with a set of description of what that looks like. You can then measure your progress towards achieving those criteria. It's the same with the SantNav. It'll tell you you're halfway through your journey. You know, and that's great. you know, and there's a sense of kind of safety in having that roadmap and so on in front of you. So, you've got to have, you got to know where you're starting from. You got to know, well, what's wrong with what's there now? Where do you want to be instead behaviorally? What's the set of a fit for purpose set of step-by-step actions that we need to take these people through? Now, some of that might be consume some content. Some of it will be reflection. Some of it will be experimentation. Some of it will be... discussion with colleagues on their experiences of trying it. Some of it will be experimentation and then practice and then more practice and then a bit more learning. So you tend to get a process of a bit of learning and then some practice, then a bit more learning and a bit of practice. So generally that'll work better that way, where you're bolting into the way the mind learns with lots of experiences, rather than just feeding them a whole bunch of content and hoping they can make a translation from that into their workflow. and into an experience that will actually help them learn. It's really interesting. they don't want to do it? So the reason I ask that... disagree with that. Very often they do want to get things better for themselves. So a lot of it is helping them understand the mindset of the learner. There's several factors that got to be in place for that. You put salt in the oats. if I can give you, if I can give you like that, if I can give you an example in the construction industry, because that's my background, my equivalent to farming is construction, is the, safety in particular, is that you get these subcontractors, these builders. And they and there's this heavy learning and development piece to safety in the construction industry. Safety first, you want to go home to your family safely, all those posters on the wall. And so they sit you down and they go induction time, we're going to induct you. Now induction is a form of training, in a sense, so kind of a micro training. Now these guys know 90 % of what's being said in the induction. They're not doing it for their learning. They're doing it because the company knows that they need to do it to show duty of care. So the company's doing to cover their legal butt. And so there's this morphing of, of training people who don't want to be trained and, that sort of thing. It's a motivational issue. Their safety issues on site are generally motivational issues, not so much learning and development. So, and I guess there's always that with learning, isn't there? You either don't know how, or you don't want to. How do you, if you're structuring up a course, are you just assuming that they are going to want to, and then you can focus on the don't know how piece or? Well, again, this depends on your outcomes. For what you're describing, you want an outcome of people behaving in a safe way and wanting to do it. That's your outcome. Yeah. in that sense, it's not so much about learning but about motivation. And what for what you're describing, probably yes, but, but motivation, you've got to it's. Motivation is an interesting one. People tell me, these people aren't motivated. And I say, well, that's a load of rubbish. Everybody's motivated all the time. It's just that right now they're motivated to do something different to what you want them to do. you know, and that motivation to do something else, whatever that is. Take the shortcut, you know, with the digger through a part of the construction site, they shouldn't be in, you know, that sort of thing. Yeah. they, that motivation is higher at that point than, than not. And you've got to say, well, what's driving these other motivational factors. And that might be because they're on contract. They want to cut some time. They're not going to take the dig around the back end of the site, which is the safe way to do it. They're going to go right through the middle because they're on top of the clock, you know? So that, I mean, I'm just guessing an example there from my experience in construction. is that a reasonable example? Yeah, there's a payoff for go taking the shortcut. think what's driving the motivation for the current behaviors. And perhaps actually it's not a knowledge issue. It's not a training issue. It is, it's a behavioral issue. So how are we driving, how are we driving the behaviors that we're seeing on site? So it's not about them doing those behaviors. They're being driven to those behaviors by something, especially when they know the way it should be done. Mm. Yeah. that really begs the question, what's driving the behavior that's there at the moment? Hmm. Yeah. Well, I don't laziness, might be lack of knowledge, it might be, there's the inevitable knowing doing gap. And that applies across our lives. mean, most people know by and large the sort of food they should be eating. But again, and some do, but many don't follow those guidelines they kind of know in terms of fruits, vegetables and bits. So there's this knowing doing gap and it's no different on your construction site, I would guess. So as you say, they've done these inductions dozens of times on lots of different sites. There might be a few wrinkles on this particular site, but by and large it's going to be the same stuff. So the way I would run that too is I would actually get them to deliver the safety briefing themselves in a sense and just say, okay, we've got to talk about, you know, wearing hard hats and PPE. Okay. What are the rules? And you ask them. to almost deliver the course themselves. And rather than preach at them is get the knowledge out of them. One reason for that is then each of them in the room and that group of people coming on site knows all the others know this. I can't ignore it. And particularly when you use some of the techniques that you guys have developed, I believe with your scratchy stuff and so on, then that there's this whole almost group think around, that's the way to do it because we've told. You know, we've said that's the way it should be done rather than someone said to us. So if someone says to us, you've got to do it that way. We can ignore that. But if we've talked to each other about that's the way to do it, then that's the way to do it. So, and then also the, the site manager or the safety officer can come back and say, hang on in the safety briefings, you guys said this. and I'm not seeing it. So were you just blowing smoke at that point or. will you really honestly believe that's the way you, you So that's just a tweak that I would make for those safety briefings. Yeah, I mean, I actually think safety briefings are not where I just don't think that's the right tool for the job. It's about dopamine, you know, and, and I believe because you need some payoff, you need an immediate payoff to do things. And there's a story of, of a guy I was at, he's in a manufacturing facility. And they were spraying this epoxy and it's a horrible stuff. And they weren't wearing their breathing equipment. And right. And so it was really hard to get them to comply to wear breathing apparatus. And you're like, mate, you're spraying epoxy. Like, just think about it. I don't think it was necessarily socioeconomic or IQ, because that's the easy go to. Yeah, yeah. I think and it could have been something to do with that, but I have a feeling that James, present James and future James. And somebody says to me, look after future James. And I go, yeah, yeah, whatever. The present James is like, no, it's all about present James. Present James finds it easier without the mask when he's spraying the epoxy pool. He doesn't worry about future James. There's an immediate payoff for present James if I take the mask off. Future James has issues, that's future James' problem. Whereas what we found with rewarding on the spot safety compliance is present James gets something out of it. Right, so then the supervisor comes over and goes, you're wearing your PPE, you're wearing your breathing apparatus. Well done, scan this, you're a champion. So firstly, I feel good because my managers just said good things to me. And then now I've got, I've won something. President James goes, payoff is good. You know, and so people think, well, maybe that's just a sugar high, but it's, it's, it's a weird thing that the more you do it, the more it becomes what's done, you know, and, then it's just, that's, that's habit, you know. it's I mean, that I can't remember the exact term, but it's discounted future benefits. The psychologists talk about this. If I offer you one pound now or a hundred pound in a year's time or, you know, dollars or whatever, a lot of people take the well, the ten dollars right now rather than a hundred in the future because it's immediate. Anything that we see as a benefit in the future is discounted in our minds. It's startling how much we discount stuff. Hmm. And anything we see as a problem in the future, we discount in the same way. that, you know, epoxy filled lungs in the future is not something that we think about now. And this is the same with diet, for example, you know, people eating junk food, processed food, all the rest of it. food gives you a dopamine hit right now. Yeah. you know, so, and yet it's, it's well known now, most, you know, there's so much in the news about ultra processed foods and all the rest of it just not doing us any favors that, you know, why, why do they, why are they, how do people even make money out of that? You know, why is it even on the shelf, people wouldn't buy it if they had any sense. And yet they do. So it's, it's the same exactly what you're talking about is that discounted view. So the only way you can fix that is to is to up the game in the present as you quite rightly point out. Yeah. To be a dopamine provider necessarily, you know, because it's like, you know, like the bell curve of health and wellness. there's a small percentage of people who don't need any external motivation that they're fully intrinsically motivated to be, but the fat part of the bell curve clearly has an issue and they need some help, you know? So, it's a really interesting one. How do you see that? related to what you've been doing. mean, so we're talking about, of course, what Scratchy does is big on the motivation piece. And we think some problems, they're hitting it with a learning and development hammer when it's really needs to be hit with a motivation hammer. Do you see overlap and how do you see the two working together? some, but also I see that people get confused in terms of skills or actions by there's two different phases to skills. There's the skills acquisition. need to learn about and acquire and practice a skill to the point where I now have it and at a sufficient level to do it, you know, without too much thought it's there. I may have to think about it, but by and large it's, now something I can do. but then there's maintenance of that skill over time. If it's never used or never reinforced, it will fade. and I think a lot of people get mixed up. They see that people not doing something and they go back to providing acquisition type. Processes for a skill that people actually already kind of have, but aren't using. Whereas really it's a maintenance problem at that point, maintaining it, using it regularly and so on. Hmm. And this is, you kind of touched on that with your safety briefing earlier. They are falling back to acquisition type stuff. Really, it should be maintenance type stuff, which is why I recommend it. Have that discussion internally where they already know it, but they talk to each other about it and you facilitate that discussion. And I guess to be honest with the outcome. So if the company is doing an induction to cover their legal behind, then they need to be honest about that in a sense or else workers will see through it. Yeah. Yeah. want you to die on this site. That's not good for us. It's not good for you and certainly not good for your kids. So let's let's talk about how we can keep you safe on the site. And just the fact that we're in this room for now, we'll tick a box that the regulatory bodies require us to take. But and that's fine. That's separate. Yeah. Yeah, that's separate to working with you guys to keep you safe. Because that's a joint collaborative effort between us and you. So if you're not doing safe stuff, then how do we figure that one out? There's a fascinating example I had with one of the big tire retailer outfits here in the UK, you you rock up, you get your tires and exhaust fixed and so on. And they were working with us many years ago now on onboarding new employees, tire fitters, or they had some fancy name for their tire fitters. can't remember, tire engineer, something, whatever it was. And what they did is they, and partly on the platform we've built, they actually had these guys do a little safety video of different things that should or should not be done around, you know, the lift, the car lifts, the various bits of equipment, and so on and so forth. And here's all the things you should see, here's all the things you should not see and so on. So it wasn't just a list of things not to do. Thankfully, there was quite a bit of stuff that people should do in there and how they should do things. So positive reinforcement. And then what they had is for each of these guys, while they were doing their induction, they were all loaned a small tablet, a seven inch tablet, just a cheap one. And Cause most of them didn't have a computer. Some of them didn't have a smartphone, you know, or if they did, they didn't want to use it for this. So they were given a small tablet and if they lasted six months with the company, they were given the tablet for free. They were just gifted it. If they left within six months, they had to give it back. and, so, and, and, one of the tasks that they were given was go around the depot and take photographs for the tablet of any things that you see as contravening what you've just seen in the safety video. Right. And so they almost went around as inspectors. It was kind of really, it was interesting. And what was fascinating is the, they noticed that some of the older employees that had been there a long time and perhaps hadn't been through this process were a bit scathing of the safety stuff. But of course, suddenly they were the ones in the gun for not putting that tool away in the proper place. You know, it was just left lying on floor or whatever for someone to trip over. And it was interesting that did change the safety culture within those various tire fitters. And, and, and of course, what, what happened is they couldn't just rail against the branch manager for pulling them up about leaving the tool on the floor. It was the safety video in this new starter. And they, and the older employees had been there, didn't really have an excuse for leaving the tool on the floor because they knew damn well that shouldn't be. Yep. And then they'd see some new starter at the other end of the room taking a snapshot of this tool on the floor and they think, shit. And so they had two options at that point. They could start doing it properly or they could go and threaten this new employee with dire consequences and my uncle's a baseball bat. But that, I mean, why would you want to do that to a new starter? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. they're not bad people, they just want to do their job. So it was a way of reminding them what good looks like without actually having to go and tap them on the shoulder. They just see someone taking this photograph thinking, ooh, you know. So. That's actually a clever way to do it. Yeah. So, so you can, there are various ways to enlist people to do things and help with that process, but from within the system, not imposed from outside. And so much of the safety training is imposed from outside and is focused on things they already know. It's, it's no longer a skills or knowledge acquisition process. It's now a maintenance process. So you have to work with them in that way. And if you do have someone who's really fresh into the construction industry, Mm. person you'd probably pull aside a little bit and say, okay, here's some extra videos for you to watch. That is some material you may not be aware of yet. And then also you can point out, excuse me, in the briefing, John or Sally over here and you on this kind of site, look after them. If they're doing something and you see them doing something that you know is not right, please tap them on the shoulder and point out the way to do it. You're enlisting. if they'd just taken photos of you doing the wrong thing, you wouldn't. Yeah. Yeah. here's your, you you, should have a buddy or a mentor on site, particularly construction sites where there's quite a bit of dangerous stuff going on. do vary in danger, obviously, depending on what's being done and, and, you know, so on and so forth. So, but yeah, it's just some thoughts and, but I think go back to that. analogy for the, you know, for training programs and things is just think of the four things. are you now behaviorally? Where do you want to get to behaviorally? How would you know you've got there? What's the set of steps to get there and kind of, how will you reinforce that? How will you, you know, keep people and hold them accountable for doing what needs to be done? But that's more the training side of it. And then the second is maintenance side of it. How do you help them maintain those behaviors once they're established? That's where you guys come in with the scratchy stuff is from what I understand of how that works. I think it's a brilliant idea. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's the motivation piece that's been long forgotten. Yeah. Yeah. So that that's maintenance. And if you separate that from acquisition in terms of skills, then that starts to explain a bit better, perhaps, where it works and where it won't as well, by the way, because your scratchy system will work great if people know what to do, but it won't do a damn thing if they don't know what to do. it motivates them to want to know what to do. So, you know, there's a classic story of the team that wasn't working and they're on one job and they come to another job and they're told about this system where you get rewarded. And they say, whatever this game is, I'm in like, you know, and I'll do whatever it is. And it gives them the autonomy, know, Deki and Ryan talk about autonomy, competence and relatedness. And it gives, says to them, you don't have to like, but if you want to win, you know, you need to do it. So it's your choice, you know. So what other questions do you have? don't know what we're doing for time here. It's been a nice chat. 50 minutes. It's gone on a bit longer than I thought, but it's been a really interesting discussion. So I think we can close it up now. Yeah. So Paul, I really appreciate having this discussion. was just in summary to sort of deconstruct what learning is starting at the end, getting a really firm view of where this person is currently. And then, you know, the middle piece. of what it takes to get there. How am I going? The satin-avan allergy. Yeah. get clear on the end point, get clear on the start point, and then you've got a gap between them. And that gap will be a behavioral gap pretty much all the time. And then how do we deliver that behavior is the key question, not how do we deliver this curriculum, but how do we deliver this behavior? And that will change the way you think about designing the program. You may end up using a lot of the same content you would have used otherwise, but you'll probably deliver it in different ways and in different patterns or different... drop points and so on. So how do we deliver this behavior? And how long might we expect it to take to deliver that behavior so that it's better and sustainable over time? Yep. Great, Paul. Well, thank you for coming on and it's really good to have met you. So, you know, I hope to keep up the discussion. if anybody wants to talk further about any of that stuff, I'm happy to always have love having a chat about learning development. People Alchemy, Paul Matthews, CEO, UK based. So thank you very much. along to any of the websites. You'll find us online and we'd be delighted to have a chat. Great. Okay. Thank you, Paul. Have a good day. Okay. See you. Bye. Okay, just

People on this episode

Head Shot

Garry Mansfield

Host
Head Shot

James Kell

Host
Head Shot

Paul Matthews

Guest