In short
Squiggly Careers Podcast Episode Summary
Episode Title
How to Change Behaviour at Work Episode Description In this episode, hosts Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis explore behavior change in the workplace, referencing a Harvard Business Review article by James Elfer, Siri Chilazi, and Edward Chang. They introduce the "Four T's" model, a structured approach to implement measurable behavioral change in teams, and apply this model to common workplace challenges including meeting interruptions, prioritizing important tasks, and sustaining objectives over time.
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Key Concepts The Four T's Model
- Target the Right Behaviour
- Identify specific behaviors to change rather than broad concepts.
- Example: Instead of aiming to be more inclusive, target reducing interruptions in meetings.
- Theory of Change
- Develop a hypothesis on how to change the targeted behavior.
- Consider potential barriers and generate ideas for interventions.
- Timeliness
- Implement interventions at opportune moments.
- Example: Reminders before meetings or incorporating behavior nudges into daily routines.
- Test the Effect
- Measure the effectiveness of the intervention to ensure it drives the desired change.
- Use qualitative and quantitative data to assess impact.
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Discussion Highlights
- Identifying Behaviors:
- Importance of specificity in defining the behavior to change.
- Engage teams in discussions about behaviors they want to improve.
- Real-World Applications:
- Example 1: Reducing interruptions in meetings can enhance inclusion and ensure everyone has space to speak.
- Example 2: Prioritizing important work over easy tasks, addressing the common tendency to choose simpler tasks over impactful ones.
- Intervention Ideas:
- Reminders of objectives to keep teams focused.
- Accountability partners or time-blocking practices to encourage focus on important tasks.
- Use of self-coaching questions or public declarations of priorities.
- Measuring Impact:
- Utilize surveys to gauge feelings of inclusion or productivity before and after the intervention.
- Examine metrics like the percentage of objectives met to track success over time.
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Key Takeaways
- Behavior Change is Challenging: Acknowledge the complexity of behavior change and aim for simplicity and specificity.
- Collaborative Approach: Involve teams in the process to foster ownership of the change initiatives.
- Continuous Improvement: Regularly assess the impact of interventions, adapting strategies as needed based on feedback and results.
- Emotional Aspect: A structured approach can help separate emotional responses from the behavior change process, making it easier to discuss and implement changes.
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Additional Resources
- Harvard Business Review Article: [To Change Company Culture, Start with One High-Impact Behavior](https://hbr.org/2026/01/to-change-company-culture-start-with-one-high-impact-behavior)
- Career Tools and Learning:
- Free career resources at [Amazing If Toolkit](https://www.amazingif.com/toolkit/)
- Subscribe to their newsletter for insights at [Squiggly Careers in Action](https://bit.ly/SquigglyCareersInAction)
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Conclusion This episode provides a structured, science-backed approach to changing workplace behaviors. By employing the Four T's model, individuals and teams can systematically address the challenges they face, leading to more impactful and meaningful work experiences. Helen and Sarah encourage listeners to apply these principles in their own teams and share their experiences.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOExploring Behavior Change at Work
0:45 to 2:36
Discussion on changing workplace behaviors based on behavioral science.
“Because I wanted to make sure I had my scientist hat on.”
Understanding the Behavior Change Model
2:36 to 4:25
Introduction to a four-step model of behavior change derived from research.
Applying Behavior Change in Teams
4:25 to 9:24
Strategies for applying the behavior change model within a team context.
“And then that's the thing that we target.”
Real-World Examples of Behavior Change
9:24 to 13:23
Discussion of practical examples illustrating the behavior change model in action.
“But I always think scales are quite simple.”
Prioritizing Work Effectively
13:23 to 14:01
How to prioritize important work over easier tasks using behavioral insights.
“So it's that like trade-off that I think we all have every single day at work.”
Exploring Ideas for Behavior Change
14:01 to 18:19
Learn creative strategies for enhancing focus and productivity at work.
“I thought you could try an objectives reminder in your inbox.”
Measuring Impact of Behavior Change
18:20 to 22:45
Discover methods to track and measure the effectiveness of interventions.
Understanding Challenges in Behavior Change
22:46 to 28:05
Examine the obstacles to behavior change and the importance of simplicity.
“obviously it was an idea sort of based on our company wasn't it to make it real and relevant I was thinking, because your point is, it's not just tracking the experiment, it's tracking the impact of it.”
Understanding Behavioral Change at Work
28:05 to 29:03
Learn about the challenges of behavior change and the importance of focusing on effective strategies.
Emotional Aspects of Behavior Change
29:03 to 30:05
Explore how a structured approach can alleviate emotional difficulties in behavior change.
Show all 12 chapters
Creating Personal Accountability in Change
30:05 to 31:26
Discover how to create personal accountability for behavior change in a fun and engaging way.
The Role of AI in Behavior Modification
31:26 to 32:01
Understand how AI can assist in improving behavior change strategies and testing ideas.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00James Elfer:Hi, I'm Helen. And I'm Sarah. And you're listening to the Squiggly Careers podcast, a weekly show where we borrow some brilliance from things we've been reading, watching, listening to, conversations that we've had, which we think are relevant for you in your squiggly career. And we take those topics and turn them into ideas for action. And Sarah has picked today's borrowed brilliance topic, so I'll hand over to her to let us know what we're going to be talking about.
0:24Sarah:so we're going to be exploring how to change behavior at work which i feel trying to give me feedback is that why yeah and we're going to be doing this live um this is based on a brilliant hbr article um that was written recently by one of our friends james alpha and james is the founder of a behavioral science kind of consultancy or practice practice is probably a better word called more than now um definitely worth a follow on linkedin you know when you know when you follow
0:53Helen:some companies and people and you just think every time I read something I'm that bit smarter than I was five minutes ago that that's what I want LinkedIn for um and he had two co-publishers um Siri Chilazi and Edward Chang so the article is the three of them together and what they talk through is this scientific model of behavior change so what they have done is some very large scale behavior change work in really big organizations so often with more than 5 ,000
1:22Edward Chang:people at once. So they're trying to figure out, I don't know, let's say we need everybody to
1:29Helen:write objectives and they don't write objectives today or have better quality career conversations
1:34Sarah:and they test all these usually relatively small interventions but then they really rigorously figure out what works and what doesn't.
1:45Helen:So they've kind of got this four-step model which I'm going to talk you through so we're kind of all up to speed and then what we've done
1:52Edward Chang:with James's permission and a few emails back and forth to him saying, am I doing this right, James? Because I wanted to make sure I had my scientist hat on. We're going to apply it at a
2:02Helen:smaller scale, as in what could you do within the team that you're in, or even perhaps just thinking about it for yourself. So perhaps before I dive into the four steps, I think it is perhaps useful just to reflect for yourself what behaviours you actually want to change, because you need to know that before you before you get into applying this um and you might that's a really good conversation to maybe have as a team you know what behaviors would we want to change as a team
2:27Edward Chang:um but you can also just do it do it for yourself helen any behaviors you want to want to change
2:32James Elfer:you might want to tell us about it is an episode of live feedback um no um well i guess two ways i'm thinking about this so what behaviors in our team but also just generally if you are looking at this as a team together what behaviors might you want to do and i wonder whether could you have a what do you can tell me because you've spoken to james whether these would be right but i'm just trying to think about some behaviors of like simplicity as a behavior you know if a team is becoming too complex like you know like i don't know defaulting to meetings long emails too many messages could you could you use this do you think on like how could we
3:12Edward Chang:behave more simply at work would that work no okay i don't i don't think so having gone back and forth with jade's quite a lot because i so i think maybe the bit after what you said would work so what you couldn't do is say the behavior i want to change is we want to be more simple
3:30Sarah:i think that would be too that almost big picture that's probably i guess the outcome that you're looking for what you could do is there you said um too many messages you you could say what we
3:43Helen:want to do is like reduce the amount of messages that everybody everyone we're a message overload land in our team so we want to reduce the amount of messages because we've kind of got a hypothesis i guess that frees up headspace and quality work so i think you almost have to be more targeted in like the behavior um which will obviously hopefully like lead on to kind of bigger things um but often the examples if you if you kind of read the examples they talk about it is it also often kind of quite small things it could be um you know fewer meetings i guess that one would
4:17Sarah:be quite appealing there's like a behavior change um can i give you another one yeah go on i had to
4:22James Elfer:stress test it um so what if the outcome i wanted was inclusion again that's too big but the thing that we were going to use the model with was interrupting yeah okay so i think i think um
4:36Edward Chang:because if we go through it let's so let's take i think that's a really interesting one let's take
4:40Helen:interruption and inclusion and go through the four steps so and they're all there it's four t's so it's helpful to remember um so the first one is outcome to target so this is like well what is your target so what we might say here is our target is i don't know zero interruptions maybe
4:58Edward Chang:maybe no one ever gets interrupted that might be unrealistic maybe our target is to half the amount
5:03Helen:of interruptions that there currently are in meetings and here they do point out there is
5:08Sarah:usually a long list of changes that you want to make you know if we were talking about all the changes we thought we could make that would improve inclusion it's not just going to be interruption and then what you are trying to consider is which one do you think will have the most impact so here we might say well we feel like interruption is going to have the most impact because give everybody we want to give everyone space to speak um and we feel like that is more important than i don't know watching some videos about inclusion that's a useful conversation in
5:41James Elfer:itself i really like this as a team thing you know like because you'd start with what's a problem or what's getting in our way or what's something i want to improve and that's like your your outcome thing and then to your point what are all the things that we could change to make that happen and which one do we think is the biggest impact?
5:54Sarah:And then that's the thing that we target. Yeah, that's the thing. So then I think that's how you get to the outcome to target. You then need to have a theory of change, which sounds quite grand. It does sound grand. Yeah, yeah.
6:07Edward Chang:I'm sure it's Joe. Well, I hope James doesn't listen to this. I'm sure he will, actually. He will be like, oh, yeah, I knew they'd say that. But this is the, I think this is your hypothesis.
6:17Helen:Like, how do you think you're going to change that behavior?
6:19Sarah:so for example if we're doing the interruptions one it might be every time you go to interrupt you write it down instead that is that how you're going to change the behavior you could say we're going to change the behavior by putting a reminder in uh people's diaries just before the team meeting to say this is a no interruption meeting so that we're going to do that that's a nancy klein idea
6:43James Elfer:i've stolen there um well that's a good point because i did i i'm joking i did read all the work that James had put out and when I was looking at that theory of change piece it said part part of to come up with it it said um look for ideas for how you could do it and they they can obviously come from the team could generate them or you could look at what other people will do so you might be like well Nancy Klein says this or person x says this and then it said also think about the barriers like what might get in the way and so I don't know maybe senior people interrupt like that's what the direction of the interruptions might be problematic who knows but actually talking ideas and barriers can inform a better theory of change so you've got your theory of
7:25Helen:change then you need to figure out a timely intervention so i really like this this is my favorite tea out of the four because this talks about the when and i think until this point you can almost talk a good game and then nothing changes because you don't actually do the thing because you forget everyone's busy doing loads of other things and so here that a timely intervention actually a good example would be right before a meeting it has the no interruption meeting reminder or an even more timely intervention would be you start a meeting with as a reminder this is a no interruption meeting or we're experimenting with no interruption meetings and this is one of them um you know so you could even know more timely than doing it
8:10Sarah:in real time so this is kind of getting as you're trying to remind people of the behavior as close
8:18Helen:to the moment as when that like behavior will happen um which i think makes sense it's almost like the kind of habit stacking thing right so that's being timely and then for as with any good experiment and any good scientist test your effect i actually think this one can be quite hard like when i was trying to think about this at like a smaller scale if you've not got behavioral
8:39Sarah:scientists like doing this for you you know how like how will you know so if you did the interruption one as an example um you both want to i suppose test whether people are interrupting
8:53Helen:less which you could do you could get somebody neutral like i've actually had this done to me where they literally mark down are you interrupting or not so you could do like an interruption audit as we would sometimes describe it but i suppose here ultimately you're testing the effect on inclusion so you're not just going we might have interrupted less but people might not feel any more included so what you'd have to figure out there i think is well what is our starting data point in terms of how included people feel that where's that come from is that from a engagement survey or are we just going to are we going to ask people beforehand are we going to come up with our own metric and then you're going to have to ask people again after a period of time to see whether the behavior that you've changed has actually then affected that kind of ultimate
9:41James Elfer:outcome that you're that you're aiming for it's making me think about our sprints okay um because and i don't we did not approach the sprints with the four t's in mind um but we you could you could i think almost critique them retrospectively because what i was thinking was when we did the sprints in our emails so for anyone that doesn't know and you're not a regular listener um twice a year we do five day sprints which are designed to accelerate people's development and we recently did one linked to our new book learning like a lobster and at the start of the sprint we asked people for i can't remember the exact question but it was sort of like how confident and in control do they feel of their learning something like that and we asked them and at the end so we create our own data point from the group of people i mean it's like thousands and thousands quite a big group of people that do the sprint and then we ask again at the end of the sprint so that we can see the impact of the learning but you could it's quite and we could take the four t's and kind of go what you know what are we targeting i think what we're targeting is basically kind of making learning easier to do every day um and then you go the theory of change and what have we learned and how are we going to test it and then the moments but i think actually it's quite a lot that we could apply but i i guess as a team to your point if you're going to do this together You might just want to create a data point at the start, which could either be qualitative or quantitative.
11:02James Elfer:But I always think scales are quite simple. On a scale of one to five, how included or whatever the thing is you're trying to measure as a start point could be a simple way to see the impact of the test.
11:14Helen:And actually, you know, I always get a bit worried about claimed behavior from like jobs I've done in the past, you know, where people say how they are going to behave versus how they're actually behaving. but actually reading um some of the work and reading the report often people it is just what people say you know that is that is how you use that is how you figure out like where people are um so it will be self-reporting sometimes it is more kind of scientific than that more kind of factual but i suppose and we've said this before feelings are also data so you know if people are feeling more included that's got to be a good thing than when people were feeling less included that is a feeling and that's that's fine too so occasionally you can read some of these examples I think and because some of them are at such big scale and are really significant it can feel hard to take you know your experience relate your experience to that so hopefully we tried a bit with the interruption example but we're going to do another one because we thought let's pick another example to bring it to life and I've tried to pick one it's actually a real one from our team but I also tried to pick one that I feel everybody will nod their heads out hopefully when they're hearing it so the context is everybody sort of says they're busy most of the time um if I say one word to describe your week at work everybody always says busy um but our challenge to that is
12:37Sarah:in reality it's quite rare that people are the same amount of busy all of the time and so initially
12:45Edward Chang:actually so i'll tell you my workings here because i i got this wrong the first time i tried to design this too because i have run this past james uh the advantage of knowing the person who's written the
12:54Helen:article is i said oh um i think our team would like to get better at prioritizing um and he was like oh i'd like to just sort of probe the problem a little bit more be more specific about the problem um and so rather than just saying prioritizing which almost kind of feels too big it's quite then hard to design the experiment and what you're going to do.
13:16Sarah:I then took a specific example that someone in our team shared with me where they said, I feel like actually probably what happens is I sometimes prioritize easy work over important or impactful work. So it's that like trade-off that I think we all have every single day at work. You think, hmm, the easy email or the hard one pager. I've had that today twice.
13:40Edward Chang:And I'm like, easy's won out. yeah i thought i've and also i then did try to do the hard one pager and i was like oh this is actually really hard go back to the easy email so uh the target is how to prioritize important
Read the full transcript
13:55James Elfer:over easy work got it that make it more specific yeah you can almost you can keep that first bit the how to prioritize but you add on that more specific element to it that's nice yeah i think
14:06Helen:you've just got to like drill down probably a little bit more than you might imagine unless your brain naturally goes up i think both you and i actually often go a bit bigger so actually we have we have to zoom in a little bit more we need that prompting um the other idea i had by the way on this is you could put the article into claude then you could put what you're going to do and
14:26Sarah:ask it to critique it so we're doing it for each other but i reckon claude act like james alpha and critique my design um he would be he's like high challenge and high care but sort of quite critical
14:40Edward Chang:friend vibes you know like he he will always try to kind of make you make you better yeah perhaps that's what we need to design like a james ai james bot um so you've got your target
14:51Helen:then your theory of change so this is how do we think we can solve this um this is my favorite
14:56Edward Chang:bit because you just you're allowed to come up with ideas so um some ideas that i came up with I was like, well, you could try.
15:04Helen:I thought you could try an objectives reminder in your inbox. So I suppose that's me connecting the dots with the work. The most important impactful work you do will be linked to you making progress on your objectives. So what if either in your diary or in your inbox every day, you got a reminder of your objectives this quarter are dot, dot, dot. that's it just tells you tells you your objectives um second idea was a sticking power coach so this was the idea that you know often with important work a bit like I did today you end up switching too soon you don't stick at it for long enough and because we're all very uh good at getting distracted and things are used to stealing our attention we're often not that good at sticking with the hard stuff and so maybe and I think you could do this using like pomodoro technique or you could use this using an AI but you actually get something to hold you to accounts in that moment to be like in the next 30 minutes I'm going to work on that one pager um I want you to like ask me some questions that are going to hold me to account I'm going to set a timer um maybe I was
16:15Edward Chang:I was trying to work out if you could even create like a blocker you know if you tried to like move tabs and it wouldn't let you imagine that like if you took that's what happens I do all my stuff on tabs so imagine if it like stopped you using tabs that was another idea I'd got and then the
16:27Sarah:third one was three coach yourself questions so you just have three coach yourself questions that you keep coming back to like um what matters most to me this week um what are my objectives for this
16:42Helen:quarter what's on my win watch like we have we have a win watch um and actually sometimes from like from knowing james and talking to him about his work he will often really encourage you to be very simple here about the interventions keep them really simple really straightforward um so i can imagine if like his voice in my head at the moment is going like he wouldn't i don't think he'd like
17:06James Elfer:the sticking power one i really like that idea i thought two more when we were talking i was thinking you could do um so you do like well you could do this a few ways maybe it's three ideas so the first was you could have like the first meeting of every day is sort of blocked out in people's diary for them so everyone has a carved out time for half an hour say for example every day and that is no meetings can go in that that's sort of like a meeting for you to work on what matters most so that goes that goes in there the second idea i had was about um doing that together so you know there's um i've seen about borrowing ideas from elsewhere for the stereo change bit where people i forgot it's called like study mate or something work yeah i think where you you just work sarah and i have a meeting at the same time which we're both in but we are not talking to a meeting yeah it's the sort of like an accountability thing i'm sure it's like work mate then the third idea i had was i think it's quite small i think it was a play to james's like that specific is every day you just have to go on a team's channel and type my most important thing today is and it's just whether that articulating and sharing creates greater clarity and commitment i guess is the thing but i love the the theory of change bit and coming up with lots of ideas and then deciding which one that's definitely a fun bit that's the good bit let's just do that
18:19Edward Chang:all day yeah never actually do never change the behavior just ideas for how you could change behavior if you if you actually tried um the other thing that you could do um and helen helen did this for for me today as she was kind of reading what i'd shared with her you can then borrow brilliance on what what do other people do so i'm sure lots of you come across urgent versus important matrix so you could be like i'm going to try using that model um stephen covey talks about putting first things first like i always think that phrase is like a really memorable one and so again you could be like you could literally just have that quote pop up every day it could be like as simple as that it's like a reminder to sort of behave in that way um we could do things like the which is what helen was talking about with like time blocking the first half an hour hour of a day like carl newport is always a really big fan of that like sort of deep work monk mode monk mode time um and so i think there's loads of different ways that you could kind of try this and i think it is often quite good to also think about the barriers because if the barriers
19:21Sarah:are too big it makes the interventions really hard so if for example you the first hour idea like we're all going to block out the first hour or half an hour for kind of this deep work on what matters most in our company if um a partner that we worked with then needed to talk to us then
19:39Edward Chang:I know for a fact both Helen and I would say yes so that would go you know like the the ability to then de-prioritize that would disappear really really quickly so I sort of think okay well we
19:51Helen:are a company that works with lots of companies and we sometimes need to react and respond quite
19:56Edward Chang:quickly so okay well maybe that's not the best that's not the best intervention for us perhaps
20:02Helen:let's try a different one let's try the accountability partner one that feels a bit more flexible so you know i think you also want to design ideas in the theory of change that reflect your context and your culture because then they stand you obviously want these to work you want
20:19Edward Chang:them to stand a good chance of success um i always think you want every idea to be like oh yeah great i think that's going to work that that's going to be the one that's going to change my behavior so you've got all your ideas that's the fun bit um then you need to try think about the timeliness
20:34Helen:so like when when are you going to use the idea so this is put the idea either in or as close to the moment as possible um this is kind of the adding in idea versus adding on that we sometimes talk about kind of with learning which i think makes a lot of sense then you have to track them
20:52Sarah:so one of the things that you will read about experiments is sometimes it's useful to have what's called a randomized control test which is essentially let's imagine there's 10 people in a
21:01Helen:team half of you do nothing five of you try one of these ideas um but i double checked for james you don't have to have a randomized control test so if as a team you wanted to try this out together half of you could do one idea and the other half could do the other idea so half the team could do the first half an hour of every day the other half of the team could do the kind of live co-working idea um the important thing is though for both of them you have to then know how you're going to
21:33Sarah:track it you know to that last point you have to know um less necessarily how did that hour feel
21:40Helen:but how are you going to figure out whether behavior change is happening so i was trying to think about it i think this thing gets quite tricky sometimes to figure out and the best thing i could come up with for our team and see if you've got any other sort of challenges or builds helen was we have a wind watch so every quarter we all know what's on all of our wind watches
22:00Sarah:and we red amber green them so you never get all greens there's always a mixture of red amber green could you look back at your red amber green percentage for the last six months and be like that's my starting point then you try this intervention and then you see whether it
22:18Helen:impacts your red amber green percentage success and you obviously you want your greens and your ambers to increase and you want your red to go down because the point is if I am doing more important impactful work that the kind of consequence of that or I should I should see that show up in more wins happening in my win watch that that was my best attempt
22:44James Elfer:yes yes I would I was very specific to our company I think what's going on in my mind is obviously it was an idea sort of based on our company wasn't it to make it real and relevant I was thinking, because your point is, it's not just tracking the experiment, it's tracking the impact of it. The change. Yeah, has it led to change? So I think, yeah, for our example, it probably is that. Because there's sort of in the moment measurement and metrics, aren't there? So for example, you could give people that, you could say like in the week or the fortnight that you were doing the change, you could get people to say here are five words to describe your day pick, at the end of every day they could pick a word and so you could, like how many times they pick the word busy versus energised, efficient or whatever other words you put in front of them.
23:36James Elfer:But that, to your point, that would just be a feeling in at the moment, not necessarily the behaviour change that we are looking for. I would quite like both though. I guess for other people it would be objectives or the impact, the effectiveness of meetings or whatever, whatever thing you're looking at. I do quite, I would quite like both data points though. I know the first one isn't meaningful behaviour change, but I would quite like to see, like just in how you've described it, I would almost like a, in that short period of time, does it look like it's made a difference? Because it could, otherwise it's quite a gap between the intervention and the impact.
24:16Sarah:I suppose you're talking about a how's it going and a how's it gone.
24:22Edward Chang:You know, like it's like both framing both of those things.
24:26Helen:And I guess sometimes in some of the work they're doing at big companies, big scale, they perhaps don't need it. Because it's like you just, they want to sort of let it play out and then be like, did it actually do anything? Has anyone actually changed their behavior? One that I'm working on at the moment with a really big company, which I think is probably quite a typical one,
24:45Edward Chang:is about performance objectives so both setting performance objectives which actually this company has quite a high like rate of you know like the percentage is quite high and sticking to performance objectives i.e do you keep them alive do you kind of go back to them and that's often a much bigger
25:03Helen:challenge because you tick the box of like we've all set our objectives but then they sort of don't stay alive you know they're not then used so one of the things that you could do is think about that is like well what are the in you know the theory of change would be the interventions the ideas what are the ideas that we could try out that would keep performance objectives alive which is essentially actually the work that we've done for this company i've i've kind of gone you could try this you could try this and and we've talked about like when like when would they do that and then actually they would have a very clear data point like do people go back in and re-look at their objectives do they remind themselves are they updating them as they go because some of the objectives no doubt they'll you know you achieve it a bit earlier or something changes so you need to update it or do they sort of sit like they used to sit in a filing cabinet i remember the days of
25:52Edward Chang:offices for filing cabinets and they now sit in a system and so they will literally have a percentage number of knowing like because it's because it is on the system it's actually very
26:00Helen:easy to see um and so often ones like that i think are helpful for people because you've got a very clear outcome but they will have to wait six months i guess at least three months before they can even then get a sense of that. So to your point, that might feel a bit like if you were doing this together as a team, you kind of want something in the meantime because otherwise maybe you lose a bit of momentum.
26:21James Elfer:I feel like it's like initial insights and then impact. Yeah, I think it depends the level that you are using this at. I think in a team, you might just want some more immediate things. If this is a cross-company strategic initiative, you've probably, given the scale of the people that you might be talking about, you can probably sit and wait because the impact is bigger. But if it's about our team using the word busy less because they feel more in control of their time and impact, I probably want some sooner insights whether this was working.
26:52Sarah:And so I think the reason we wanted to do an episode on this today
26:55Helen:is as well as it being a brilliant article,
26:58Edward Chang:I think it is a really simple structure to follow. I think everybody can have a go at this. We are clearly no experts.
27:06Helen:But you can read it and follow it and then hopefully this will have helped as well. And universally, I think what team doesn't have a behavior that they would like to change? Because, you know, we are all work in progress. No team is perfect at everything. And I like that this encourages you to be really specific.
27:25Sarah:So it almost doesn't work if you go too big, which both Helen and I have done initially. It's then quite hard to follow the four T's.
27:32Helen:Whereas actually, if you're like, right, the thing we want to change is loads of the people, teams and companies we're working with at the moment want to get better at saying the hard thing so that's actually the other one that I've been applying this to I've been like right you want to get better at saying the hard thing right all the ideas like how we might do that
27:48Sarah:when when are we going to do that how are we going to test it and anything like that where you just think oh you know we've got a bit of a no do gap or a bit of a say do gap like we know this is
27:59Helen:important but for whatever reason we're not doing it usually because it's hard because behavior change is hard and I think what James and more than now are always really trying to encourage us all to think about is going yes behavior change is hard and that's why you've got to be specific it's why you've got to keep it really simple and you've got to kind of measure it so that then almost you don't waste your time in the wrong places that's one of the things that actually James talks about a lot on LinkedIn is often we or companies will invest in things because you think it's the answer to these problems but a lot of that is without any of you know you don't know necessarily whether it works so his point is massively over invest in the things that work
28:41Edward Chang:like figure out what works if doing sticking power works and suddenly everyone's spending more time on most important work right that's it go for it get everybody doing it like really kind of create a
28:52Helen:lot of momentum around that but don't waste your time on loads of stuff that you know isn't actually
28:58Edward Chang:having the you like to tell ourselves it might be having the impact we think but it isn't actually so it's good it's a good rigorous test for your brain it is and it takes i think some of the emotion out of it a little bit you know because you know behavior change can feel like if you
29:12James Elfer:let's take the interrupting thing like you saying to me i think we should i think you should stop interrupting helen would be a bit harsh and you know it's a bit of an emotive thing for you to say it's hard for me to hear and all that sort of stuff but if we said okay this is behavior that's important to us and this is how we're going to do it and we've got this rigorous process suddenly I think the process takes away some of the emotion from the problem I find anyway I'm like okay well I can focus I can focus on this on this process I can work this through becomes a lot more objective which I think is is easier for teams when things need to be changed yeah that's definitely true
29:47Edward Chang:because I even found that today because I definitely had a moment today where I chose
29:51Sarah:easy over important and i was thinking oh if i in that moment if i had just had a nudge a reminder
29:58Edward Chang:and like a something that could have been like no sarah like this is this matters most whether that is a reminder of my objectives or someone online who didn't let me or something i'm watching i'm watching you sarah you've just clicked off the one page that you're meant to be finishing or i honestly think the old tab blocker thing is genius i just need to work out how you make that
30:20Siri Chilazi:happen do you remember like oh my gosh i'm gonna make myself really old now really old put you remember like early days of microsoft the little paper clip that popped up the little animation obviously when that came back it's just like it's your conscience yeah i'm here i'm your
30:35Edward Chang:conscious paper clip those emails can wait but the one page you can't i think it would actually be i don't think to your point it makes it um it also involves you you know like no one likes behavior change that you've been told to do yeah um whereas here i think you are you're creating the ideas you're creating that theory of change and then you're sort of holding yourself to account to kind of have a go at it and then you're figuring out what works and what doesn't and that feels quite objective it's not that you like i could try one thing you could try another and one of them might work loads better and that's not because of me or because of you it's just because actually that intervention that idea is what's had the most impact and then you all get better um so it has a nice mix of it feels actually quite fun and quite playful to create like i've quite enjoyed almost i keep applying it to loads of different things you know you're like oh the sprint or say the hard thing so i think you can see loads of examples of where it's useful and it's not that hard to get started i feel here like the barriers to having a go sometimes it takes a bit of thought like i i said before this i did write up a few and sent them on email to James and he came back and asked a few questions um so I think some bits of it are easier than others but I think for most behaviors you'll be able to at least have a go even if you're like my my testing isn't perfect or it's not a foolproof it might not pass some sort of rigorous test I'm like probably still better to do it than to not do it and like we said you could always run
32:00James Elfer:it by AI and say you know take what's in this article as a structure and tell me how to kind to build it better that's definitely going to help a bit and so that's everything for this week um
32:11Edward Chang:let us know if you do have a go at changing behavior at work using the four t's we always love to hear from you and also if there's something you want us to borrow brilliance from
32:21Sarah:a person a place we've done objects we've done events a book a company that you're like wow they do this brilliantly and very open to different ideas but we're really enjoying exploring this
32:32Helen:format we hope it's working really well for you and still feeling useful you can always email we're Helen and Sarah at squigglycareers.com but that's everything for this week thank you so much for listening I'm back with you again soon bye for now thanks everyone bye for now
From the publisher
In this episode, Helen and Sarah borrow brilliance from a powerful Harvard Business Review article by James Elfer, Siri Chilazi, and Edward Chang on the science of behaviour change at work.They unpack the “Four T’s” model, a practical framework used in big organisations to drive measurable behaviour change. But instead of keeping it theoretical, they apply it to real team challenges like:
- Reducing interruptions in meetings
- Prioritising important work over easy tasks
- Keeping objectives alive (not just setting them)
- Moving from “busy” to genuinely impactful
You’ll hear how to get specific about the behaviour you want to change, design simple interventions that fit your culture, introduce them at the right moment, and measure whether they’re actually working. If you’ve ever said, “We know what to do… we’re just not doing it,” this episode will give you a structured, science-backed way to close that say-do gap, without adding more noise to your workload.
Episode 539
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(00:00) How to Change Behaviour at Work
(01:00) The Four T’s explained
(05:49) Step 1: Target the right behaviour
(07:02) Step 2: Build your theory of change
(08:28) Step 3: Make it timely
(09:27) Step 4: Test the effect
(10:48) Real examples from teams
📚 Resources Mentioned
To Change Company Culture, Start with One High-Impact Behavior: https://hbr.org/2026/01/to-change-company-culture-start-with-one-high-impact-behavior
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