Skip to main content

Make Your Company a Habit


What makes you effective at work? Perhaps you'd say it is your excellent communication skills, your deep background in your field, or perhaps your ability to think on your feet. Chances are, you wouldn't focus much on your habits. Yet your routines are a powerful force that affects your daily behavior.

Habits are associations that relate aspects of your world to an action. Your brain is a habit creating machine that allows you to perform those actions without having to think. An organized workspace allows you to focus your thoughts on the difficult new problems that you face without having to think about mundane aspects of work like filling out routine forms, pulling out a sheet of paper to take notes, or picking up the phone to answer a call. Indeed, if you move to a new office you probably find the first few weeks uncomfortable because your old habits no longer work and you have not yet developed new ones. You suddenly find yourself thinking about all kinds of simple tasks.

Whenever there is a consistent relationship between the world and an action, and you repeat that action several times, you will develop a habit. This habit will form whether you practice the action deliberately or just repeat it in the course of your daily routine. Not only are habits crucial to your personal success, they are also central to the behavior of your customers. Unless you are in a business where you interact with each customer only once, your customers have habits related to their interactions with you. Here is what that means for your business.

Stop asking your customers why they do what they do. We all love surveys. You ask people questions, and they answer them. But if your customers are on autopilot much of the time, then they are not aware of many of the factors that influence their actions. That means that what people tell you in surveys and focus groups is not an accurate readout of what really influences their behavior. It is better to use methods to observe what people are doing than to ask them directly.

Learn your customers' habits. As much as your customers may like your business, they do not want to have to think about every interaction they have with you. Every time that you redesign a corporate website, a product's packaging, or a user interface, you are disrupting your customer's habits. Not only is it frustrating for customers to have to relearn how to do something they used to be able to do without thinking, each time your customer has to think, it opens up an opportunity for them to think about switching to a competitor.

Design for habits. When you do have to redesign something, make sure you know which aspects of the old design are influencing your customers' habits. Make an effort to keep those elements as consistent as possible to minimize the disruption of the new design.

Nurture new habits. Customers have to repeat a new behavior before it becomes a habit. The studies on habit development suggest that there are many factors that affect exactly how many repetitions that is, but 20 is not a bad start. Help customers repeat a new behavior enough times for a habit to form. Get to know how your customers interact with you and work to create that practice for them.
Influence the environment. Habits are affected by what is easily seen. If your customers need to use your product or service regularly, then you need to make sure it stays in their environment. For service companies, this means finding ways to stay front-of-mind. For product companies, make products attractive enough to be kept out rather than put away in a closet or drawer.

Disrupt habits for competitors. Chances are, there are at least a few people out there who could be your customers but are loyal to a competitor instead. Those people have habits too. Study the habits of people who use your competitors. Find ways to affect their environment to get them to think about their choices. Of course, you need to make sure that any changes you make don't disrupt the habits of the customers who are already loyal to you.

In the end, the importance of habits inverts a common wisdom about successful businesses. You may think that you want your customers to think about you often. In fact, you often want your customers to act without thinking.  

Make Your Company a Habit
Art Markman
Wed, 29 Jun 2011 18:10:52 GMT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

3 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Diving Into Becoming an Entrepreneur

This post originally appeared in Inc . The pursuit of an entrepreneurial venture feels a lot like jumping off a high cliff into deep water. It's scary at first and there's no going back once you leap, but after you muster up the courage, it is one of life's most exhilarating experiences. Before you hastily rush into a triple backflip dive, it is best to do some homework and prepare. Is the water deep enough to attempt a safe dive? Has anyone jumped from this point before (and survived)? After I jump, is there a way for me to get back to land safely? Is getting hurt worth the risk? Entrepreneurship is no different. Success is about more than just quitting your job and leaping head over heels into your venture. You first have to do your homework. It's hard to define the right time to begin a new endeavor, and the reality is no time is ever going to be perfect. But before you take the plunge, here are three questions to consider. 1) Are you personally a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Stop Playing the Victim with Your Time

This post originally appeared in HBR "It’s just not fair. There’s always too much to do. Everyone just keeps piling more work on me. I feel so helpless." Sound familiar? If so, you’re not alone. Many people feel like they have a crushing number of requests coming at them from every side that make them a victim to their circumstances. They see forces outside themselves as the reason that they don’t have time to exercise, can’t leave work at a reasonable time, or just generally struggle to get everything done. Although there are occasionally situations that are outside of your control — that recent bout with the flu, for example — most aren’t. And even though it can feel gratifying in the short term to blame others for your situation, this attitude toward your  time investment will leave you truly powerless in the long run. When you play the victim with your time, everything around you suffers. You’re constantly on edge in your interactions with others because you f...
Post a Comment
Read more

7 Ways to Build a Focused Team

This post originally appeared in Inc. Buzzing about which new startups will prosper and which will flop is a favorite pastime in Silicon Valley. But a new company's prospects aren't based on just what the company creates, says Stanford professor  Lindred Greer . They're also based on the people creating it and, more important, how they treat one another.  "Startup success is as much about managing the people as it is about creating the product," says Greer, an organizational behavior professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Based on her research on entrepreneurship and team dynamics, Greer will teach a new course at Stanford GSB this spring focusing on the unique team-dynamic challenges faced by early-stage startups. In a recent interview, she offered tips for managing startup teams. Be Aware of Culture in Early Stage Startups The culture of early stage startups forms the backbone of the culture the company will have in later years. Therefor...
Post a Comment
Read more