My mom always says, "you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar". In other words, people respond better to rewards than punishment. As a leader or marketers, if you want to make your customers or your employees change behavior, then the things that you can do is give them a positive strength especially when they do what you want.
Several studies conclude that positive reinforcement is the best way to encourage better behavior. Two recent studies examining the concept more and giving us a better insight into why this can be run well.
Study 1: the consequences of punishment would encourage deceptive nature
A new study conducted by the McGill researchers indicate that kids lie to parents when facing penalties. When they are encouraged to tell the truth about their wrong behaviour without punishment so kids tend to be honest. Victoria Talway, a child psychology, studied children aged ranging from four to eight years, they were told not to peek at the hidden toy when adults leave the room. If the children were told that there are penalties for a peek, they'd be lying. But if they are told not to peek and tell the truth without punishment, they will confess to spying. Conclusion taken Talway is kids will lie to calm adults.
If you threaten employees or your customers with an act of punishment when they do things that you don't want, you will encourage them to lie. Although you are not their parents, they'd say things that can soothe you. This is unfortunate, because it looks like you have two problems. First, they keep doing things that are not what you want. Second, they are lying to you, destroy the relationship of trust that you have built.
Study 2: the award is better than fine
Daniel Pink is a host Crowd Control and wrote several books about human behavior. He studied the best thing that can be done to prevent minor transgressions. He determines the minor transgressions such as mengebut, cross the road carelessly, and parking places for the disabled. Any violation of this imposed a penalty of a fine. But in the show performed Pink, exactly the opposite he gives incentives for people who comply with the rules, and it turned out to be far more effective than threats of fines.
He found people given incentives not to mengebut, reducing their speed around the 1/3 from its normal. He also gets similar results when applying it to a person who likes to cross the indiscriminate and Park place, the disabled.
Your customers have a behavior that would spend the budget of your organization. The simplest example is they want the Bill in the form of paper. The cost to make a Bill (in the form of paper) is huge for the company, whereas with digital Bill cheaper cost. When the customer an additional fee for paper bills, they tend to be uncomfortable and give negative feelings to the company, and they don't like to be doing what you want. If you give a prize for customers who want to move to digital Bill, they'll be happy to switch to digital bills and have a positive experience.
Positive reinforcement is the key here. Human behavior is driven by many factors, one of which is the emotional rewards and positive feelings. Play this for your benefit is a way to harness the power of human behaviour and use it to get the results you want and they'll thank You later.
In what ways do you use for positive reinforcement over punishment consequences in order to get the behavior you want from your customers or your employees? Please give your views in the comments section.
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