Will COVID-19 change human behaviour and put purpose into digital transformation?

Exploring emerging human behaviour and purpose during COVID-19. Tracking today's challenges to find tomorrow's solutions.

In just a few weeks, the UK has moved from a situation where brands and service providers lead human behaviour, to a world almost entirely led by scientists and government policymakers. Human behaviour is now being influenced by lock downs, self isolation and social distancing experiments on a global scale.

As with all experiments, there is a high rate of trial-and-error, which is challenging our need for control and certainty. Nevertheless, people are looking for signals to emerge from the noise to help them answer questions about what comes next:

When will this end?

How will the world be different when it does?

How do I need to adapt and respond?

EY Seren teams are running 2-week sprints of mixed-method research to understand how the global pandemic is changing how we live and how we work.

The starting hypothesis is that human behaviour has changed significantly, and that service providers will need to significantly change what they offer and how they offer it, to meet these new needs. In the report we plot some of the key trends, including:

New purpose in service

COVID-19 has clarified our collective sense of purpose and mission - to protect one-another and save lives. As such there is a renewed focus within services, both public and private-sector, on selfless service.

EY Seren teams believe that this will be a defining generational moment, akin to the Second World War, and will remain in the social memory as a time when the collective need overtook selfish motivations. People will ask "What did you do in COVID-19?" This is a powerful opportunity to reconnect the service you run with the root instinct people have to serve one another. How can you service help progress people through this crisis?

Look beyond user-centred design or customer journey mapping, to consider how your value proposition meets the broader human needs of people and their families. Go further into purpose-centred design, where you design services for communities and society as a whole.

Straining digital capacity

For many, life has moved online. Things that were done offline, such as communicating, banking, shopping and working, have been forced online. The experience has been mixed, depending on your digital access and skills, your need and your providers capacity.

Cognitive psychology tells us it takes between 12 weeks to 12 months to form new habits. So we can expect an accelerated and sustained shift to digital. However, this places pressure on providers to accelerate the design and test of a new generation of smart digital services, which can resolve more complex needs. Amazon have demonstrated the success of neural-network chatbots over rules- based.

Provide resources to help people adapt to new ways of interacting with your service. Also consider your customer's capacity to use those resources - personalise their experience so they only see what they need to see and then make content very simple, provide learning tools for first time users, and conduct rapid testing with those users to refine designs before and during deployment.

Health evidencing and etiquette

As lockdown is gradually released people will be expected to provide evidence of their health status in three ways: whether they have it, have had it or have come into contact with people who have had it. This will be driven by policymakers so they can allow people to access work and consumer services.

Clearly a lot needs to be proved before this comes into effect. The key question is how much personal data people are willing to give up to big tech and government, in return for access to services. EY Seren teams anticipate variety across segments, but given consumers already give data for services, plus the likelihood employers will ask staff to score themselves to enable 'back to work', we believe people will likely adopt the system willingly.

Consider how your organisation could make use of this service, to manage employees returning to work, or customers getting access to certain services? Who checks scores, where and how, and what is the process for handling different outcomes? The real issue with this approach is not the data they’re collecting today, but how they might be used tomorrow.

Homification of work

The boundary between home and work has dissolved leading to significant changes in behaviour both about how work is done, and how well it is done.

The long-held promise of teleworking has finally overcome its cultural barriers, by necessity. Given the work-life benefits, carbon reduction and freeing up of office space, this will be a sustained shift in work-life behaviour.

Ensure physical wellbeing of colleagues working from home, where equipment, layout and boundaries are less than ideal. Coach managers and leaders on how to manage in remote environments, including the shifts in trust and transparency, and from synchronous to asynchronous work patters.

Adapting and becoming more adaptive

Everyone is being forced to rapidly adapt to the new situation – emotionally and practically – and are realising that the need to get used to adapting in the long-term.

As scientists have always said, the only certainty is uncertainty, and that uncertainty looks set to last for months to come. Service providers are in a great position to help customers adapt to this world, either by making their propositions more adaptive, or by helping customers learn how to adapt better e.g., to online interactions.

Helping people to adapt is critical right now. The two keys to behavioural adaptation are resources and capacity - don't provide resources (information and content explaining changes to customers and employees) without considering how you increase their capacity to act upon it (make it findable, simple, usable, understandable and actionable). Otherwise given the information overload people are reporting, the change is unlikely to stick.

Enterprise agility tested

Service providers’ ability to change quickly is being tested - colleagues, managers, leaders, and organisations – in both the private and public sector, are having to rapidly experiment at strategic, tactical and operational levels, simultaneously.

Retail, healthcare and banking are ahead of the curve. We expect every industry to experience their own rapid shift to greater agility across the enterprise. Consider how your organisation will cope. Agile isn't a niche software and UX practice anymore. Everyone needs to be agile now.

Focus on creating organisational agility, by compressing lines of dialogue between C-suite and frontline, adjusting tolerances for risk to assure compliance, empowering autonomy within squads of multiskilled colleagues, tasked with solving clearly defined problems in sprints.

We’re all vulnerable

In addition to the financial fall out from the crisis, which is driving financial vulnerability, people now also face health vulnerabilities, access vulnerabilities and emotional vulnerabilities.

EY Seren teams expect many people to remain vulnerable for the duration of the crisis. Providers are accelerating work, in particular to identify and prioritise those experiencing more than one form of vulnerability, so they can provide them with appropriate treatment strategies. If in doubt, assume each customer has got some sort of vulnerability.

Recognise that vulnerability is a multifactor classification. Work with data teams to identify customers and create treatment strategies for each.

Download EY Seren’s Human Signals report where we plot these key trends and share more insights and recommendations on how to respond Now, Next and Beyond.