Hello, and Happy Tuesday!

I have a confession to make: I spent years not washing my recyclables. 

What was the point? Fewer bees on my curb? Cleaner trucks? I couldn’t make sense of it, so I didn’t do it.

Then a friend explained to me how recycling facilities can’t process paper and cardboard that get contaminated. Not washing my recyclables was causing, what would have been usable material, to get sent to a landfill. In fact, the whole recycling process was far more complex than I had imagined from my consumer vantage point.   

Learning the benefit of washing recyclables was all I needed to change my behavior. 

I’ve recently connected with a few operations executives who have been frustrated with the lack of long-term adoption in their efforts towards efficiency. They train their agents on a new workflow, and a few weeks later, only half the team is following it.

There’s a number of reasons this could be, but one of the most common is that the benefits to the change are still unclear.

There’s a difference between “please wash before recycling” and “please wash before recycling or we lose recyclable materials, reducing our impact.” The first is just a memo. The second creates understanding.

Which one are you using with your team?

For more ideas on improving change adoption, check out “5 Tips for Getting Team Buy-In on Change.”

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