January—the first month of the new year, and a time to reflect on the lessons of the past year. A time to set things anew and create resolutions to do something differently to achieve better outcomes personally or in the workplace.
According to folklore, the weather of the first twelve days of the year indicates how the following twelve months will go. The same can be true for your habits. With the right mindset, if you have a good first twelve days of the year working on new habits, you can set yourself up for a successful year.
Good habits are tough to form, and bad ones are hard to break—that’s why you shouldn’t do it alone. According to our How to Make Habits Stick guide:
“The best way to ensure that you stick to what you set out to do is to involve someone else. If you share your goals with others, they will keep you accountable—which is vital to sticking to a routine and achieving your goals. Having to tell someone you failed is more distressing than missing a day and quietly resuming your activities the next day. That’s why it’s good to have a buddy at the gym. They will push you to go that little bit further where, if you were by yourself, you’d stop when it got too hard.”
But in order to get everyone on the same page, this message must be communicated. Why not create a digital display presentation on the topic of creating new habits/resolutions for the new year?
Start with a statistic to get their attention:
Did you know that fewer than 10% of people actually achieve their goals when trying to create new habits?
Your next point should illustrate the fact that this problem is solvable, as long as people understand the difference between a routine and a habit. Define these in your presentation:
• A routine is an everyday task, chore, or duty that you do at a particular time
• A habit is something that you do regularly, often subconsciously
Skipping a routine doesn’t feel as bad or uncomfortable as not performing a habit. People can often justify not eating lunch at noon one day (routine) but not putting on their seatbelt before driving (habit) feels unnatural.
If you want to change a habit then you first need to look at the routine associated with that habit. Smoking cigarettes is a hard habit to break because people associate smoking with a lot of routines (e.g., having a cigarette with a coffee in the morning, having a cigarette after eating a big dinner, having a cigarette while driving to and from work, and so on). In order to break the habit, something in the routine needs to change first.
In safety, when people become complacent to risks, their habits automatically kick in (regardless of whether those habits have a positive or negative impact on safety). Communicating this in your digital display presentation can help people succeed while maintaining their new habits.
Additionally, creating a habit and telling other people helps develop a sense of accountability. Communicating this in your digital display presentation or in a safety meeting will get people talking about it at your worksite and spark them to push each other to succeed. Here are some points you should include:
1. Make a schedule
Whether your group is trying to use existing routines to incorporate new habits or creating a new routine to stay on track with habit-building, they must set a schedule to stay on task. Consciously planning the time spent on specific tasks increases efficiency. When creating a schedule to work on habits, it’s important to start small—a manageable task in small chunks of time doesn’t take away from things already planned in an existing schedule, only takes a small amount of time to complete, and therefore feels more achievable.
Another benefit to scheduling time to work on habits is that people can coordinate their schedules with others to work on habits together. Doing a new activity in a group is a way to make people less nervous, ensures they show up and allows the group to hold each other accountable in their new endeavor (lunchtime walks or workouts are a popular workplace habit that people do together).
2. Prioritize tasks
It’s important that people know the time scheduled to work on habits has to be non-negotiable in order to be successful. Things are always going to come up that cause people not to want to put in the work when trying to form new habits. When it comes to human factors, you can’t always predict what’s going to happen. Things beyond our control will inevitably happen. But you can control how you react to these situations. Encourage people not to become discouraged if their schedule has to be altered slightly. The important part is not giving up. In your digital display presentation, suggest using scheduling tools to keep them on task with their habit formation.
3. Pay attention to the human factors
One thing that is vitally important when working on habits is to self-trigger on any human factors that may be experienced. As previously noted, scheduling and prioritizing tasks is important—but when a new habit is thrown into an existing schedule, it’s not uncommon for rushing, frustration or even fatigue to influence habit-building during the formative stages. Your digital display presentation should reiterate that self-triggering when people are in one of these states can prevent an incident from occurring and help the habit-building from derailing. If others are practicing the same habit you are, tell a story about how your state of mind impacted you working on your habit. This will not only hold you accountable for developing your habit but it could even prompt a meaningful conversation.
By integrating these strategies into your digital display presentation, you can effectively start the conversation about people collectively working on habits in your facility. Establish accountability by sharing your own goals with your team—this will help to keep you on task and ensure you continue to perform them daily, and it could make it easier for your team to build their own habits too.