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| 27/09/06 | | Surveys, rewards and shame |
Bob Sutton has a terrific post describing how Cedars-Sinai Medical Center got all their doctors to wash their hands. He main source for the post is a New York Times Magazine article called Selling Soap by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt.
The hospital started out with 65% compliance. [Now this percentage is thrown into question by some Australian research which showed that when doctors were asked, using a survey, whether they wash their hands, 73% said yes. When the researchers observed their behaviour they only detected 9% compliance. Here is another reason to be careful in using surveys to understand what’s happening in a social system.]
Back to the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The first step they took was to reward anyone they saw washing their hands by handing out $10 Starbucks vouchers. This pushed compliance up to 85% but seemed to hit a ceiling.
They got the hospital up to nearly 100% by asking influential to place their hands in culture dish then photographing the bacteria and widely displaying the images, even putting one of the more disgusting as a screen saver for every computer in the hospital.
Both these examples are what I would call interventions. That is, a discrete, relatively small activities designed to change the system. It’s not a massive change program. It tackles one issue as a time and can make a huge difference. I think most large organisations get stuck into the mind-set of having to do the big programme—”we’re a big organisation, right!”
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Comments
A great example, Shaun, thanks. And also - tapping into those other areas we share - a good example of using the social network and the heroes/stories instead of some spirit-stifling dictat cascaded down through corporate comms channels.
Posted by: Tony Quinlan at September 28, 2006 1:20 AM