Every morning we get out of bed, shower, brush our teeth, put on deodorant and get dressed — always the same sequence, day in and day out. It’s our brain’s way of organizing routine tasks, thus saving brain capacity for more pressing concerns. In “The Power of Habit,” Charles Duhigg outlines the psychology of habits and how it affects our work due to its three distinct stages:
1. Cue — a signal to the brain on which habit to follow.
2. Routine — the script to follow or action taken.
3. Reward — the satisfaction of an expected outcome.
Breaking away from reactive maintenance is all about eliminating bad habits, but more specifically, the rewards that invoke them. Why habits?
There are many attributes in establishing proactive maintenance, and it’s often difficult to put all the pieces of the puzzle together. However, we can all agree people are the most critical element. By understanding the different stages of habits (cue, routine and reward) we can begin to modify our organization’s behaviors to promote proactive maintenance. We will look at a few of these habits that could potentially transform our organization.
We start with leadership accepting maintenance firefighting as a work culture. Not only do we allow our critical planning roles to get pulled into emergency work but also we typically award better for their emergency work over their proactive work. Duhigg’s book reminds us this type of reward is only enforcing bad habits. In Diane Vaughan’s “The Challenger Launch Decision,” she states, “Social normalization of deviance is when people within the organization become so accustomed to a deviant behavior they no longer consider it deviant.”
The bad habit of accepting reactive maintenance equates to exposing your team to undue risks. What is keeping tragedies from befalling a reactive organization? In most cases, it’s the senior-level work management staff who has applied the proper work urgency on their sites for decades. Although we do not want to stop rewarding our people for excellent work, we, as leaders, should strive to find attractive rewards for proactive work that will replace the excessive emergency work.
Proactive maintenance teams use key performance indicators, or KPIs, to drive out waste, maximize resource allocation and keep their assets safe. Many organizations have a bad habit of utilizing too many KPIs, making goals ambiguous and weakening their focus. This is actually a culmination of several bad habits shared between execution and leadership, and I would love to explore this complex relationship, but frankly that’s a whole other article. They may have been initiated with a worthy goal in mind, but if we’re going to see any changes in bad habits, we need to eliminate those divergent rewards and some of those excess KPIs. Get your teams back to a few fundamental KPIs, take the time to establish a proper reward system and watch those bad habits slowly become displaced.
We could continue with lists of bad habits, ranging from poor meeting cadences to neglecting to walk down jobsites, but the story remains the same. These habits were formed because the same cues, routines and rewards perpetuated without interruption. We don’t need much assistance in identifying bad habits. We need to spend time analyzing these cues, routines and rewards in order to identify critical inflection points. This is where I believe it’s pertinent to employ process coaches. Oftentimes, all the ingredients are in place for proactive maintenance, but we simply lack the change management resources to take advantage of inflection points and divert bad habits. An inflection point is the integral moment when a transition is possible, causing a new habit to take hold.
Process coaches can leverage their experiences to utilize these moments for impacting change. As those opportunities unfold, numerous other habits will be unlocked with far less effort, bridging the gap to a proactive culture and enabling new growth and sustainability.
For more information, visit www.nexusglobal.com, or contact Towse at (855) 488-0068 or d.towse@nexusglobal.com.
