Sending the right message is trickier than you think

Corporate messages often fall short of their intentions, here’s why.

All too often, management sends out company-wide messages to stimulate a certain type of behavior, or vice versa, to discourage certain behavior. If you don’t do this right, the results might be exactly the opposite of what you are aiming for.

When we take part in any social setting, we notice that people do certain things in specific ways. We can tell what is considered to be “normal” by the group and what is not. These what we call social norms are of great influence on our own behavior. Because we deal with social norms inside organizations as well — as part of the company culture — I want to highlight one specific aspect of social norms, and that is the power — or the lack thereof — of public messages.

American professor of psychology and marketing — and persuasion expert — Robert Cialdini, worked with the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona to see how they could prevent people from taking petrified wood out of the forest — in other words, to prevent stealing — by using different signs near the entrance of the forest. One message they tried out, read, “Many past visitors have removed petrified wood from the park, changing the natural state of the Petrified Forest”, while another…