Messages to Change Behaviour
Here are some tips on how to send effective SMS campaigns.
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Work-Life Balance as Corporate Discourse
Workplaces focus on individual behaviour as a measure of work/ life balance. Social science places the issue of health and wellbeing in a broader socioeconomic context.
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How to Set and Achieve Goals
How can your business support customers in achieving their goals? Setting goals and making public commitments are ideal ways to encourage behaviour change, whether it’s improving our wellbeing at home, or delivering better services. Here are a few tips from social science.
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How to Communicate Effectively for Behavioural Change
Usually, when we create communications in Western societies, we’re used to telling a story. For example, emails usually follow a narrative format: an introduction to the organisation, followed by information about a project, background to the issue, further information about current objectives, and we end with our request. Evidence from behavioural science shows this format, while highly familiar, rarely shifts behaviour. This post provides tips for improving communications.
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Social Networks at Work
People’s social relationships are organised in clusters – groups of individuals who are connected together, who share norms and values, and who exchange information.
Knowledge tends to stick within each cluster, but there are people who have bridging social ties to more than one group. Let’s delve deeper using social science.
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Strengthening Interdisciplinary Teams
Today, I want to share one specific strategy that worked well in increasing positive interdisciplinary collaboration.
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Supporting International Graduates in the Workplace
A significant but growing minority of Australia-educated international graduates show signs of economic disadvantage in the Australian workforce, despite their Australian qualifications. While these students have gained their degrees in Australia, my research shows they are less successful in finding work in their chosen profession relative to students from English-speaking countries and Australia-born graduates. The largest disadvantage occurs for students born in India and China who are aged in their 20s.
They face discrimination from employers who exclude considering them for roles, presuming that their English language skills are poor, or that their cultural differences would make them a poor organisational fit. This is not aligned with evidence showing that cultural diversity enriches workplaces.
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Rethinking the Life Course
In many Western societies, we go about our daily routine, we generally think about our life trajectory following a fairly linear path. So what happens if our work lives are disrupted?
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Beyond Stereotypes of Gen Y
This infographic draws on a number of market research surveys by popular websites. The data show that Millennials are highly educated, entrepreneurial and hard-working. But what does the social science research say?
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Toxic Management
Sociologists Martha Crowley and Randy Hodson conducted a study of the organisational dysfunction at General Motors. In a climate where people feared job cuts, every layer of management was afraid to report problems upwards, as there were many examples of people who had been fired after raising issues.
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