Coronavirus and Behaviour Change
1, 2, 3, 4, 5……
I’m in the next room, and a large smile spreads across my face.
13, 16, 14….and that smile turns into a chuckle.
My 5-year old son is practicing his counting. Speaking three languages each day and with most of his school instruction coming in Catalan, we thought it a good idea to try and re-enforce some of the basics at home. My wife came up with the counting idea while he washed his hands. And taking it to the next level, as he has done in the past few days, of counting beyond 10, through the tricky teens to 20, has important lessons for us all in the midst of the emerging global epidemic that is COVID-19.
I’m sure you know your numbers pretty well by now, but do you get to the recommended 20 (seconds) when washing your hands? 10? 5?? Your habits might just change over the next few weeks.
Thorough hand-washing has been a part of public health campaigns for over 100 years. From the CDC in the US to the NHS in the UK it remains a periodic focus for health officials who know the relevant research, such as a meta-level research study by the Canadian Medical Association Journal in January of 2014 which brought together more than 20 years of research into the common cold. How to catch it less often, and when you do, how do you spend less time with it. The big conclusion? Hand washing of course. If we take greater care on washing our hands, this has a much greater impact on the cold than any type of vitamin supplement or drug.
Hospitals know this only too well, with an acute appreciation of the danger of disease and germs spread between wards by well-travelled and overworked nurses in particular. Yet can you ask nurses to wash their hands 50, 100 times a day? Even the recommended washing time of 20 seconds can feel like an eternity. So instead of disrupting the daily operation of the hospital in such a significant way, not to mention fight on a cultural level with behavior change, they made it easy by simply placing hand sanitizers on the back of each door, with the desired habit to have a quick spray and clean when entering and leaving each ward.
The importance of clean hands has also been present in the private sector, especially in those companies with a mission of doing good and doing well. It’s been at the core of Unilever’s sustainability strategy and particularly its Sustainable Living Plan. Building on the traditions of a company in which millions of children took part in a Clean Hands Health campaign in 1920s America, hand-washing classes have been offered in rural India since 2002. Former CEO Paul Polman extended this across the developing world with more hand-washing work offered in the years 2011-2015 than in the previous 20. The 21-day course, using Unilever’s Lifebuoy soap, has been shown by independent studies to reduce diarrhea cases by 25% and increases school attendance because children are sick less often.
From health to performance, hand-washing was also part of the lauded Cumulative Effect of Marginal Gains strategy for Great British Olympic track cycling. Moving from a position of mediocrity, having won one Gold medal in 100 years, to unprecedented success for any country, winning 22 Golds in the last three Olympics, one of their ‘marginal gains’ was having a London-based surgeon teaching the Olympic cyclists how to wash their hands. Particular focus was placed on the back of the thumb, the area that many of us omit, and where different germs can cause sickness or even a minor decrease in the 70km/h average speeds where winning or losing comes down to the thickness of a bicycle tyre.
Ok, ok, so you get the picture. Clean hands! But will such heightened awareness lead to sustainable behaviour change? As commentary has been passed by the likes of the Financial Times and McKinsey on the effects and legacy of the Coronavirus in the past few days, this might be one of the big questions.
I write these reflections a day after finding out one of our March leadership development workshops with Salesforce is cancelled as the company places a temporary ban on all non-essential travel for their 50,000 employees. As Marc Benioff and co talk of new office protocols, and I see evidence of these at other clients such as my visit to Uber in Paris last week, I’m in the same position as many other business professionals in reflecting on the long-term effects of this crisis. As many experts, including Bill Gates predict that Coronavirus may be the first of similar outbreaks in the future we may all need to consider our own agility around learning and behaviour, just like a 5 year-old counting to 20.
