The best software for quality and risk management.The one constant in life is that everything changes. Even within organisations. From switching to a new software package or new guidelines and working agreements to more impactful changes such as major organisational changes. A well thought-out information campaign removes resistance and creates more support and understanding for change. It stimulates awareness and behavioural change, for example when it comes to quality and safety. What does the ‘ideal’ information campaign consist of? What success factors should you take into account? In this blog, you will read how to set up an effective information campaign and how a tool like Zenya BOOST can help.
Like external campaigns, internal information campaigns are suitable for numerous purposes. If you start working with new software, for instance, or want to pay extra attention to an important topic such as safe working. Or if you have to comply with new laws and regulations, but the knowledge internally is not up to date. An example: if your company will soon be subject to NIS2, the new European security directive, you can use an effective information campaign to teach employees to recognise cyber security risks.
With an internal information campaign, you encourage employees and managers to behave in a certain way. Suppose you observe an increase in a certain type of incidents within the organisation. Analysis shows that these incidents are mainly related to inattention. An information campaign can then help you make employees aware of the risks and start a dialogue about what could be done better. In this way, the campaign provides starting points for new or tightened working agreements, for instance.
But behaviour is fleeting, and change is not achieved overnight. How quickly someone picks up new behaviour and keeps it up varies from person to person. Several studies have shown that learning a new behaviour takes about 66 days on average. This is because behavioural change occurs in phases.
According to Marcel Balm’s learning model for behaviour change, we can distinguish the following phases:
A person is open to new information and allows a change to begin. At this stage, the focus of your information campaign is on reaching, activating and clearly conveying why this change is wanted and what the impact is.
In this phase, the emphasis is on developing and acquiring knowledge, attitudes and skills to learn and apply the desired behaviour. For your information campaign, this means explaining, sharing knowledge and giving the tools to actually be able to put the behaviour into practice.
In this phase, someone applies the learned behaviour in their work. With your information campaign, you can continue to validate the effect and benefits, for example by sharing success stories from colleagues.
A person has learned the new behaviour and applies it more and more. Now it needs to be sustained so that it ‘sticks’ as a new habit. In the information campaign, it is important to keep repeating, encouraging and rewarding.
Every successful campaign starts with management commitment. By being open about the ins and outs of the organisation, but especially by creating a culture where employees feel safe to voice their opinions and discuss issues.
By informing and involving employees from the beginning, you send the signal that you are listening to them and taking them seriously. Especially if employees feel they can really contribute to the success of the campaign.
Exemplary behaviour by managers and executives is important to encourage people to also exhibit the desired behaviour. In addition, social proof is a valuable persuasion principle. People are herd animals: if employees notice that others contribute, they are more likely to do so themselves.
Keep the steps in the campaign as small and achievable as possible, so that they are easy for everyone to take. Sometimes it is necessary to add extra steps to the campaign for certain target groups, e.g. for participants with a specific role or responsibility or participants with a different language level or media preference. This way, you adequately respond to the specific context and needs of all employees.
Give your target audience a reason that makes them want to participate. For example, by challenging or exciting them. Make it light-hearted and deliver the message with a touch of humour. An incentive can also help people over the threshold.
Campaigns that are repeated more often or run longer generally have more impact than one-off campaigns. Because the more the desired behaviour goes against our instincts and evolutionary programming, the more time and effort it takes to get people on board. You can see a good example of this in the Dutch TV programme Brainhack (KRO-NCRV). In it, the team tries to subconsciously influence young people to choose a pokébowl instead of a hamburger with fries, which turns out to be quite difficult.
Every person is different. The way people take in new information also differs. If instructions or information documents are enough for some, videos or games will help others pick it up. This makes sufficient variation in communication channels and content types essential.
Getting a unified message across different channels and media is a complicated job. As is targeted communication: how do you deliver the message in such a way that everyone understands it? And how do you make sure your message is relevant to everyone? Tuning and coordinating the entire information campaign is also a complex and time-consuming task. How do you keep an overview and keep the momentum going?
The following steps will help you optimise the process around your internal information campaigns.
Optimising information campaigns aims to make them faster, more efficient and more effective. This makes it more enjoyable for those involved and saves time that they can spend on other work. Moreover, a structured and (partly) automated campaign approach ensures that you do not have to reinvent the wheel with every campaign.
The following questions provide an insight into how the process for setting up and executing an information campaign is now:
These questions will give you an idea of the improvement areas for your internal campaigns:
The right tool makes planning and executing information campaigns easier and more effective. Working together in one environment with the same documents and agreements – instead of countless Excel sheets and endless meetings – gives more efficiency and overview. No more double work or forgetting things, because from now on everyone is well informed and all requirements can be found in one central location.
The right tool is also a must-have during the execution of the information campaign. To track progress, monitor results and make interim adjustments or add additional steps if necessary.
Zenya BOOST is a tool that lets you quickly set up an information campaign for any topic imaginable. With Zenya BOOST, you create attractive campaign steps in no time, which you can easily plan and monitor step by step. With stimulating statements, polls, knowledge flashes, short and personal videos, interactive mini-games or other ‘bite-sized information chunks’, you activate people, create awareness and take them with you in a subtle, approachable way to change their behaviour.
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