How Digital Platforms Go Beyond Entertainment to Rewire Your Brain

Just about seven in every ten people worldwide now use a mobile device (DataReportal): last year users aged 16–64 spent an average of 3.8 hours daily on their phones (Independent). Social media, communications and streaming services such as TikTok and Netflix took up most of this time, with users also web browsing, shopping and gaming.

But there’s a lot more the smartphone can do! Remember that this compact invention is more powerful than the tech which took mankind to the moon.

In fact, this little device has big potential as a digital companion. Digital companions are designed to support positive change, helping you to develop habits, live more safely, change behaviour, improve quality of life and support your loved ones.

How do they work? Digital companions such as YOUFactors can, among other things, nudge you to take small, regular actions that keep you feeling confident and healthy and also help pre-empt unexpected errors and accidents. Over time those improvements really add up, saving us a lot of wasted time and effort, not to mention boosting our everyday experience and sparing us the damage that can be caused by accidents large and small.

YOUFactors has been designed with these massive long-term benefits in mind.

The Key is Human Psychology

Let’s turn away from the digital for a moment and look instead at the psychological, because the way your brain works is the key to successfully dealing with errors and encouraging better behaviours.

The human brain likes habit for a simple reason: it takes less energy. If there was one mantra for how your brain likes to do things, it would be ‘fix it and forget it’.

So, how do you build a habit that deals with errors and promotes better behaviours but does not tax the brain?

The answer is by planting cues in your environment to trigger an action you need to make sure happens. An example might be placing a letter on your driver seat in the evening so that you are reminded to post it in the morning.

Cues of all sorts can be easily set up in advance to ‘nudge’ our brains once in a while, reminding it that there are particular techniques that, repeated over time, build and sustain wellbeing (e.g., taking our daily Vitamin D or doing a quick set of squats) and pre-empt errors large and small (e.g., asking us to reflect on our mental and physical state before taking on a high-stakes task).

Companion Not Distraction

Now you’re wondering where digital devices or digital learning platforms come into this. The fact is we’re not so good at nudging ourselves. Resolutions fade. We forget things. In fact, the World Health Organisation has estimated that 125,000 Americans die each year (Verywell Health) because they are not remembering, or otherwise failing to keep up with, their prescribed meds.

Paradoxically, in the busy arena of everyday life, it can be difficult to prioritise our long-term goals, even when the stakes could not be higher.

The answer? Your digital companion can be set to nudge you at exactly the moments you need. Beyond that, YOUFactors for example, has a Rate-Your-State facility that lets each user rapidly get the lowdown on their personal mental and physical situation. This quick act alone will undercut the power of the unexpected, plus patterns can be picked up through repeated use. A Close-Call Analysis tool lets you cut to the heart of what made an incident potentially risky, while a Social Feed allows for sharing of personal insights with others on the same skills-building journey.

Now consider what can happen if you take that smartphone capacity that is being left on the table and scale up the solution. A digital nudge companion offers your business a massive opportunity to boost each worker’s safety and performance AND reduce the cost of errors and accidents. YOUFactors is built on decades of insight into worker strengths and vulnerabilities in this area.

Not only that: YOUFactors comes with a library of interactive videos and refresher lessons to remind us of how exactly errors come about and how we can deal with them.

This is time well spent as refresher content has a dramatic effect on information retention and behavioural change, especially when it comes to high-stakes contexts such as workplace safety. Why? Again, that is just how the human brain works and has always worked.

Who doesn’t want, ultimately, to better themselves and enjoy a safer and more satisfying life at home and at work? Your team, not to mention all the stakeholders affected by your organisation’s overall performance, will thank you for the brainwave.

Takeaways

• We underestimate the power of our smartphone to improve the lives of our team members at work and beyond.
• That phone in your pocket can hold all the insights you need to tackle any error-prevention challenge you might face.
• A digital learning solution like YOUFactors can make your life better (and safer) through building habits that are better for well-being and error minimisation.
• You don’t need a special room or equipment, just a digital nudge platform, the new and most effective way to pick up skills.
• You can still make time for cat videos if you really want to!

Thanks for reading. Now take the next step and check out YOUFactors, the digital companion developed out of decades of research and workplace experience, using brain science for end users to optimise safety and performance through customisable prompts and timely nudges, rating systems, interactive videos, analytical tools and social sharing to leverage group support. Whatever level of interaction you need, the YOUFactors digital companion app can provide it.

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