A nudge to reduce injuries at work

By Pelle Guldborg Hansen & Andreas Maaløe Jespersen

"It's just easier to do it yourself, rather than asking and then waiting for somebody to come and help." We all know this way of reasoning. However, it may easily become a huge problem and a big expense at work, if a helping hand is what ultimately stands between another day at work and a long term working injury.

This is especially true if you are working in a team, but fail to call upon a helping hand when handling heavy objects and other physically taxing working tasks. In such situations, 'just doing it yourself' may lead to the repetition of unhealthy movements or just that one wrong lift that your back will regret for months to come.

It is not just that many workplaces are abundant with these kinds of hidden-risk tasks - i.e. tasks where the individual worker may obviously succeed in performing the task on her own, but a collective effort relieves long term, yet often, invisible consequences or seriously reduce the invisible risk of a sudden injury. It also seems reasonable to suspect that the problem may be reinforced by several external factors, such as norms of masculinity or self-reliance, or if the working team suffers from a low level of social capital.

So how do we deal with hidden-risk tasks?
One obvious "solution" is dealing with the problem by ignoring it and thereby failing to end up in the important conversation were we realize the hidden nature of the problem as a group or team. If this is the case, the hidden-risk problem is not only maintained in our working-environment. Its consequences may also persist to damage the team's social capital by increasing the frequency of replacements, drain the budget with temporaries, and causing the team to work faster, harder and at higher risk when being low on staff.

Even when we do succeed in establishing a mutual recognition of hidden-risk problems, my experience is that we often fail to take appropriate measures to deal with them. We approach problems of hidden-risk by targeting our social-norms or a team's social capital in the hope that the effect will then spill-over in the right situation.

At its worst this means talking about what we "ought to do" or "ought to have done" and possibly ending up playing the blame game. At its best it means building up the team's social capital and then crossing fingers hoping that this will kick in at just the right moment - i.e. when you need that helping hand, although you could have done it by yourself.

A nudge to reduce injuries at work
However, the other day when giving a talk at OKÆ, Pelle was presented with a good example of how to use nudging to deal with the problem of hidden-risk. In the municipality's big central kitchen OKÆ Foodservice a poster displays how many days have passed since the last working injury occurred. In fact, we've since then been told that this nudge has been used at factories since the '50ties! (please comment if you know anything about this).

This poster neither changes the options available to the staff, nor the structure of incentives embedded in their working environment. Thus, it qualifies as a nudge. Yet, I think it very likely that it may help reduce work injuries related to hidden-risk problems.

For one, as you can see, the chosen design requires the poster to be updated every day with a marker. Thus it functions as a continuous reminder. Everyday, at least one person has to think about the risk of injuries at work.

Second, it may function as a "catcher". That is, on the same line as the Fly in the Urinal and calorie labels on menus it may catch the attention of those working in a hidden-risk environment (though we think the there's some space for improving the chosen design).

Third, the poster re-frames the hidden-risk problems likely to cause injuries at work, so that from being a theme of individual consideration, responsibility and consequence, hidden-risk problems in the working environment become a collective consideration, responsibility and problem. Ideally this means that you will no longer need to ask for that helping hand, when you could do it on your own. Instead others will be on the look-out to prevent those hidden-risks from materializing. That is, it may help to promote ground-floor team-work as a means to avoid situations of risk by creating a new frame of reference that emphasizes the collective aspect of the possible consequences and creating a healthy competition where the team competes against itself.

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A word of caution

That said, a word of caution is also needed. The poster-nudge is a social nudge and as such it presents the usual dangers of invoking social dynamics as part of behavioral interventions.

While the poster may help avoid hidden-risk problems at work, it may also lead to some negative and unintended effects. Might workers for instance come to hide their work-injuries from co-workers and employers in order not to ruin the record?

Of course, this is one of those instances where the role of social capital becomes important. Yet, social capital may even worsen such unintended effects, if nudging is combined with other measures.

Why? Injuries will always happen, but just as hidden-risks, they may not be observable. The poster-system doesn't allow for that "margin of error" to save "the record". This means that if e.g. one tries to combine this nudge with a premium for achieving a particular record - e.g. 100 days - one may ultimately not only reinforce the unintended effect by having workers hide their injuries to save "the record". They will also have a strong reason to hide the injury in order to save the team's premium - a reason that may indeed be conjectured to be reinforced by higher levels of social capital within the team.

Unfortunately, the premium combination has been chosen at Foodservice - it's just so natural for us to reward behavior, even when we only need a nudge.

Bulletin News: When you need a nudge in kindergarten

by Pelle Guldborg Hansen

The other day something happened in my son's kindergarten. Well, actually not in his kindergarten, since he's a first grader in school now. But something happened in the Danish version of the after-school day-care that my son attends - and that something has been happening ever since he started in kindergarten.

So what happened?
Every now and then - that is, two or three times a year - all parents are asked to participate in a grand meeting at their kids' kindergarten, school or after-school day-care. However, since none of these institutions can force, threaten, punish or reward you for attending these meetings they have no other choice than to nudge the parents, and then trust that they will take out their time and show up.

So yesterday, the same thing as always happened: only a tiny fraction of the parents turned up. That is, around 5 out of the approximately 150 parents to approx. 75 kids (sorry, modern family structures makes the exact numbers very difficult to calculate). Unfortunately, besides the fact that this was the first time ever I missed out, this is not a unique unfolding of events. Of all the parents' meeting that I've attended during the years, only the very first meeting or meetings regarding very special events have been attended by more than a tiny fraction.

So who's to blame?
What happens next is just as usual: the blame game. "Why isn't the other parents showing up?" everyone present ask.

First come the usual suspects: "they don't know how important these meetings are", and "they are too lazy and uninvolved" - sometimes someone even suggests the game-theoretic one: "if everyone else shows up, they reason they don't have to, and if everyone else stay at home, they reason that so can they!"

These are all plausible explanation. The only problem is that they all share one suspicious feature: they make the people present and who are now giving their explanations look like pure saints: they know how important these meeting are, they are not lazy and uninvolved, and they do not reason in the self-interested way predicted by classical game theory.

Only then someone suggests the shocking truth: "people might just have missed the information..."


The morality of the bulletin board 
However, while this is usually true, the truth is not always looked upon with sympathy: "It was announced on the bulletin board." someone states with a clear and cold voice.

"Well, they might have missed it anyway. After all, I even forget to check it sometimes." you might consider answering.

But here's my advice: don't. Because the response you'll get is likely to be this: "It was announced on the bulletin board, and everyone knows that this is where we announce important news, so they ought to know that they ought to look at it." and since every parent clearly knows that this is true, it is quite hard to argue against it. Finally, the following presupposition is sometimes made explicit: "And if people don't, that's clearly because they don't find our work at this institution sufficiently important!"

The real explanation
The problem is just that we do not always do what we - upon reflection - know we ought to do. Just as you cannot derive an "ought" from an "is", you cannot derive an "is" from an "ought". We don't always act according to the ideals we aspire to.

Why? Well, in the above case the explanation is that our attention usually not focused on the occasional and rare announcements - even if it's nailed to the bulletin board. It's not that we don't care or don't respect the work that the employees put into their job. It's just the fact that the important announcements are so rare and so much else is going on, that we don't focus on the bulletin board.

The real problem
So why is this important? Well, the real problem in all of these cases is that as long as we don't focus on the real explanations when we discuss and devise solutions, we often end up burning up our institutions' hard earned social capital. In other words, the morality of the bulletin board makes people draw ill-conceived distinctions that feed suspicions and dissatisfaction.

The real question
This is what makes the above situation a clear candidate for a nudge. You're not allowed to force, make threats, or issue fines. So how would you go about ensuring that almost all parents turn up the next time?