Customer reception: can highlighting breaches make them seem normal?
At reception, reminders sometimes describe the very breaches they are meant to prevent. The management question is specific: does emphasising how often people disregard an instruction encourage compliance, or risk normalising non-compliance?
What the literature establishes
Robert B. Cialdini, Raymond R. Reno and Carl A. Kallgren (1990, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) distinguish descriptive norms, which indicate what others do, from injunctive norms, which indicate what is approved. Their experiments on littering in public places show that behaviour depends in part on which norm the situation makes salient. For reception teams, this suggests that a phrase such as “many visitors forget their badges” does more than communicate a problem: it also provides information about other people’s behaviour.
When a collective benchmark has the opposite effect
P. Wesley Schultz, Jessica M. Nolan, Robert B. Cialdini, Noah J. Goldstein and Vladas Griskevicius (2007, Psychological Science) studied messages comparing households’ electricity consumption with that of their neighbours. Descriptive information brought consumption closer to the average, with an undesirable effect among households that initially used little energy; an approval signal prevented this effect in their study. The mechanism matters: a collective benchmark can pull behaviour in the opposite direction to the intended outcome.
The hasty conclusion
One might conclude that simply claiming all visitors follow the rules would solve the problem. These studies justify neither an unverifiable claim nor indiscriminate pressure to conform. A more cautious approach is to state the expected behaviour and its purpose without presenting breaches as commonplace. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence does not allow us to promise
These studies concern littering and energy consumption, not visitor reception at pharmaceutical or logistics sites. They do not demonstrate that changing wording alone improves safety, satisfaction or compliance with access procedures. Language comprehension, the visibility of instructions and the practical ability to follow them remain alternative explanations to examine.
A practical check in Basel
As part of SHR’s “Accueil client” programme, a Basel exercise could compare an existing reminder focused on omissions with a direct instruction during comparable time slots at the same reception point, without changing access requirements. For pharmaceutical, life sciences, Rhine logistics or international R&D sites, an example would be: “Please keep your badge visible throughout your visit so that authorised visitors can be identified easily”, where that rule applies. The measure would be the proportion of visitors requiring a second reminder out of all visitors concerned, also recording reception language and visit type, without collecting identifying data. Any observed difference would be a local signal requiring confirmation, not general proof that the wording works. To go further: explore the Client Reception training in Basel in the canton of Basel-Stadt, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Client Reception in Basel
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