In The Bystander Effect, I talked about how we look to others for social cues about how to behave in new situations and how, as change agents, we can take advantage of the effect. But what can we do when the social cues are hidden? In the embedded video, I talk about ways to publicize good behavior with examples:
- a different way to encourage reuse of hotel towels
- a journal editor who reduced wait times for peer review
- a software engineering practice that doubles as a habit transmission mechanism
In Switch, the Heath brothers described how a hotel changed how they encouraged towel reuse. They replaced their usual conservation message with a message saying that most other guests reused their towels. This resulted in a 26% increase in towel reuse from those who got the new message. The Heath brothers reasoned that the hotel’s efforts to publicize good behavior of other hotel guests acted as a social cue.
Publicize Good Behavior on Software Teams
So what is the hotel towel strategy for software teams? How do you publicize good behavior of software engineers? There are probably many such strategies, but I would suggest pair programming as a particularly strong one. In addition to being a transmission mechanism of team norms, pairing is a good habit in itself for the usual reasons:
- higher quality
- faster on-boarding of new team members
- increased intra-team knowledge sharing
Pair-programming with someone is a great opportunity to pass along good habits. Say you’re trying to get the team to practice more Test-Driven Development. You have pockets of TDD happening, but it hasn’t taken root everywhere yet. Every time you pair, you can demonstrate the benefits of TDD. Encourage those with the best TDD skills to pair with those who don’t practice it. As pairs rotate, those that don’t usually practice TDD will encounter more and more people who do. This exposure to the group norm may then encourage good habits in your teams like the hotel messages encouraged good habits in their guests.
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