Behaviorism

When I was working as a Quality Coach for XYZ, I observed the behaviourist approach to learning firsthand. Indeed, call centre staff's work was evaluated in relation to the client's feedback they received as the outcome of a phone call whose objective was to solve a technical issue.

Team members who were receiving negative feedback were required to attend the weekly "War rooms" were their quality coach, team leader, manager and a training consultant would listen to the recorded call together and detail each part of the quality call process while pointing out the errors and correct answers. Each meeting generally resulted in the employee receiving a warning with the promise of a disciplinary action after 3 warnings.

As a result of this approach, I noticed that approximately half of the team were responding well and was generally not re-invited into a war room and the other half was responding half-heartedly sometimes missing the war rooms by 0.5% in their customer satisfaction scores.

In this case, I believe that a one-size-fits-all stimulus was applied in order to shape the staff's behaviour into following the quality call process resulting in better scores that would prevent them from attending the war rooms.

To some, this behaviourist approach served as a positive reinforcement as they relished in their better results while petrified of falling off their pedestal. Others experienced the approach like a negative reinforcement because their behaviour changed just enough not to be called into a war room again but not enough to have experienced learning in a positive manner that would radically changed their behaviour and get excellent scores.

Both groups showed signs of stress, de-motivation and negative competition.

As a result of my observations and following discussions with the team, I realized that there was not enough positive reinforcement that would stimulate the team to do and feel better.

This is why I enrolled the services of a cartoon designer and a photographer on the team and we created the Customer Satisfaction Motivation Board Game.

The goal of the game was for each cartoon team member to climb up a ladder towards "CSAT heaven" as CSAT (Customer satisfaction) results were received weekly and for the ones approaching the top to coach the 2 staff directly behind them on the ladder.

The 5 members at the bottom of the ladder were given a choice of selecting their coach.

The objective of the game was to empower each individual by giving them an opportunity to share their knowledge with others and to motivate them in moving upwards on the ladder. Those who consistently reached the upper level for 4 consecutive weeks were given a certificate of achievement by their team leader at the end of each month.

The CSAT results improved by 1% in the first month, 3% the following month and by the 5th month, the whole team had surpassed the minimum 90% CSAT score. As moral and scores improved, the war rooms became more or less obsolete.

As part of the behaviourist approach, I was able to include aspect of constructivism which resulted in positive learning experiences, a change of behaviour through positive reinforcement and team engagement.

Using the above example, the advantage of developing instruction grounded in behaviourism was to reach better results and change behaviours in order to achieve this.

However, the disadvantage of using a one-size-fits-all approach only conduced to change behaviour just enough to avert punishment rather than to enrich staff's knowledge in a positive manner.

It was only by adding elements of constructivism and brain-based theories in the behaviourist approach that the team was able to reach great results and adopted a positive learning behaviour through engagement.

The sole approach of behaviourism was not capable of achieving such results.