The science of attention
Understanding habituation is the key to engaging communication that cuts through and connects.
For leaders tasked with the crucial role of informing, inspiring, educating, motivating and engaging their people and teams, good communication is essential. This is especially true for safety and wellness professionals, whose work is incredibly important to the employee experience and overall success of the organisation.
Many of the typical issues can be traced back to a common, yet problematic way many organisations communicate. Specifically, a phenomenon known as habituation.
You might not have heard of it, but you’ve definitely experienced it. If you’ve ever sat at the wheel of a car without remembering the details of the drive, tuned out during television commercials, or conducted a perfectly normal conversation with other parents amid the din of a five-year-old’s birthday party, you’ve felt what it’s like to be habituated.
In the workplace, habituation is equally insidious. What starts as an exciting new program, campaign or agenda, soon fades into the background — as unnoticed as the crack in the ceiling that’s been there since ‘99.
In fact, take a quick stroll around your site or office, starting from the car park, and conduct an audit of all the safety communication you see. Look for signage, communication aids people are exposed to on a daily or regular basis — any line of site materials. Chances are, you’ll rediscover things that’ve been in plain sight for the past year, but you no longer noticed.
This is what habituation is. And what’s particularly dangerous is it’s easy to assume we’ve communicated and engaged with our workforce on important topics, when we actually haven’t.
To understand how to combat the effects of habituation, let’s take a closer at what it actually is.
It’s all in our minds
Our brain comprises two minds: implicit and explicit. Our implicit mind takes care of the routine tasks, things that can be done automatically. This frees our explicit mind to think about intentional things, until something unexpected or important draws our full attention.
The relationship between these two minds is the reason we can perform routine and repetitive tasks with very little conscious thought. Factory work, clerical work, construction and driving: these are some of the roles where people are prone to operating on autopilot.
It’s because we’re animals
For all humankind’s advances and achievements, biologically, we’re still just animals. And just like any other beast, we learn in order to survive.
This method of learning is habituation.
Over time, we learn not to respond to something that happens repeatedly without variation, reward or punishment. This allows us to tune out the non-essentials and focus on the things that matter — the things that require our full attention.
This is problematic for important messaging — particularly safety communication.
It’s a matter of exposure
The speed at which habituation occurs depends on four main factors:
Frequency: The more often we’re exposed to something, the faster habituation occurs.
Interval: The less time between exposures to something, the faster habituation occurs.
Duration: The longer we’re exposed to something, the faster habituation occurs.
Strength: The stronger something is, the faster habituation occurs. However, very strong stimuli leads to slower habituation, and in extreme cases it may never occur.
So — how do we break habituation?
Build a rhythm of unpredictability and delight
To break habituation, leaders need to address the causes: change the stimulus, change the frequency, change the interval, change the duration, and reduce the strength.
This means changing the medium, changing the channel and changing the style. For an organisation that always uses posters — share a video. If video is ubiquitous, plaster the toilet door with a poster of two. If safety signage has been gathering dust since mutton-chops were fashionable, tear them down and change them up. Never default to templates for really important messages.
Shred the style guide
Truly, words fail when it comes to expressing the utter absurdity of using brand guidelines for any internal communication.
Style guides are designed to foster highly consistent external communication. Frequency, interval, duration, strength: these factors are extremely effective at gaining the attention of customers, people exposed to communication intermittently. But when the same techniques are used internally, to people exposed to the branding every single day — habituation is inevitable, as is the loss of attention and engagement that comes with it.
Effective workplace communication should consider more than consistency in the details and visuals; it should focus on the vision. The why. The culture. The values. The message. The stories. It should encourage creativity and allow for variation. It should foster curiosity, anticipation, surprise and humour to inspire and delight. It should make people feel something.
To gain attention and engage their people and teams, leaders need to push past typical messaging and dare to create communication that cuts through habituation.