To Change Company Culture, Start with One High-Impact Behavior

"Behavior is at the heart of nearly every challenge in the workplace, from leadership and fair decisions to high performance and AI adoption. But how should organizations go about influencing behavior? Most HR and leadership teams follow an intuitive model-they inform and inspire with education and communication campaigns, and they build capability with training and development programs. On the face of it, that seems like a watertight strategy."

" is the founder of James Elfer MoreThanNow, a behavioral-science practice that helps leaders and HR teams design better workplaces. He is also a research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School and a visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics. is a senior researcher at the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School, where she studies fairness and gender equality in the workplace. Her work focuses on debiasing organizational structures through behavioral design. She is the coauthor, with Iris Bohnet, of Siri Chilazi Make Work Fair: Data-Driven Design for Real Results (Harper Business, 2025). Edward Chang is an assistant professor in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit at Harvard Business School and a member of the Inclusion Lab."

Behavior drives most workplace challenges, including leadership, fairness, performance, and AI adoption. Common organizational approaches focus on informing and inspiring through education and communication, and on building capability through training and development. This model appears logical because providing evidence and skills should enable people to change. However, relying solely on information and capability overlooks other determinants of behavior such as context, incentives, and structural design. Effective influence requires behavioral-science–informed design that alters environments, processes, and defaults to make desired actions easier and more likely. Organizations must integrate data-driven interventions, measurement, and iterative testing to ensure changes stick.

Read at Harvard Business Review