Want your employees to deliver good performance? Try nudging them.

Want your employees to deliver good performance? Try nudging them.

Before we get started, here are a few scenarios for you. Imagine this- your salesperson is doing well, so you congratulate them. They seem to be working towards their targets, so you send across a message to motivate them to go the extra mile. When they fall off their path, you send a message to encourage them to keep going.

Sounds familiar, right? What if your KPI measurement system came with features that let you do this automatically, with no manual intervention required?

In this blog, we’ll go over why nudges work so well in the organisational context, and how you can use them to deliver and drive performance in your organisation.

Nudges

So, what are nudges really? These are great ways to gently influence people towards favourable outcomes while keeping other options open. The operating keyword being, “gently.”

“While nudges are subtle, they derive their surprising power in part from the fact that they are structural elements embedded into choice architecture, steering behavior in a predictable way, without forbidding any options or significantly changing economic incentives.
–Forbes, “Small is Beautiful: Using Gentle Nudges to Change Organizations”

Driving performance with nudges

A simple, well-timed nudge can allow your employees to orient themselves to the business imperatives they need to focus on. Let’s look at an example. If an individual salesperson has a sales target of INR 50,000 per month, you could split it up into per-day targets. You can send them daily notifications on how far they’ve progressed and how much longer they need to go.

This way, your employees get to focus on smaller goals that have an incremental impact on your larger business goals. Let’s see a few examples of what these nudges could look like

For target achievement:

target achievement

For being on track:

on track

For needing to focus more on sales:

It’s important that these nudges are customised to every user’s performance. So that they get the sense that their efforts are being recognised.

Bsharp Score lets you personalise your messages, so you can send notifications that work best for your teams!

Nudges for communication from management

Nudges also play a key role in sending product and brand updates to your frontline employees at the right time. The other alternative here is to have information trickle down from the corporate offices, which takes a lot of time. That might be a little inefficient. Especially when it is your frontline employees that represent your brand to your customers.

This is why it is becoming increasingly important for businesses to build/adopt tools that allow them to nudge their employees.

Role of nudges

How do nudges operate?

Nudges operate on two fronts: first, they let managers measure the impact of their communication efforts. Second, they give your employees a clear indication of the action you expect them to take. This will help them act in their best interest, as well as the company’s.

At this stage, you might encounter a small problem. Because our phones are constantly being flooded with notifications all the time, notification fatigue sets in sometimes. Your teams might not respond positively to your well-meaning nudges or even disable notifications.

In such cases, a pattern might work well. For example, every Tuesday at 11:00 A.M. you could send out notifications to your retail staff notifying them of their standing with respect to their targets. This way, you can still adequately remind your teams of their performance.

Remember that nudges don’t always need to be performance-related. You can use your enablement platform to also send reminders to employees to look after themselves. To take a break, to stretch their legs, stay well hydrated, and so on. Not only will this be a welcome change from the rest of the notifications, but it will also make your employees feel cared for.

Role of nudges (1)

Nudges are so much more than simple reminders, and by making use of them, you can inspire behavioural change in your employees, which will ultimately lead to good performance and greater success for your company.

Bsharp Score lets you do just that. You can configure your nudges the way you want. You can preselect a few presets or even add your own, and decide which days to deploy them. Based on where your teams are with respect to their targets.

To see how Bsharp Score can enable your frontline

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