Business strategy lives or dies on whether people act differently, and most organizations are better at setting priorities than at building the daily habits that carry those priorities into the work. Perceptyx runs strong programs: an annual listening experience, 360 feedback surveys, and development programs like our Leader Development Series and our Women's Impact Network. Each one creates a moment of insight or skill. What none of them could guarantee on its own was that the behavior would still be there a month later, after the calendar filled back up. As Perceptyx's internal champion for practicing what we preach, I ensure that we leverage our own products to drive our behavioral change. I started this work with a simple question: How do you connect an organizational priority to individual behavior change, sustainably, and at scale?
Perceptyx has clear business priorities connected to its programs, and each one resolves to a set of behaviors someone has to perform repeatedly for the priority to succeed. Prioritizing AI adoption requires leaders who continually and visibly model curiosity and experimentation. A culture of accountability depends on leaders who regularly own decisions out loud. Developing the next generation of leaders calls for visible executive presence in everyday interactions, not only at the conference podium.
Those behaviors were already showing up in our work in two places. On the listening side, when I designed our 360 feedback survey, I wrote custom items mapped to the behaviors that matter for our priorities, because I wanted those behaviors measured. On the development side, I was running programs whose content risked becoming a hear-it-and-forget-it experience. The behaviors were defined in the listening data and taught in the development programs, but nothing reliably reinforced them in the days and weeks between. Connecting those two sides in one system is the thesis behind the People Activation System. Nudges are the reinforcement tool through which that connection becomes daily practice.
A reminder tells someone to do something. A nudge tells them what to do, why it matters for their situation, and how to do it in the next 30 seconds. Each of our standard (i.e., non-custom) nudges is a behavioral intervention generated from listening data, mapped to one of the 90 behaviors in the People Insights Model, and drawn from a science-backed library of roughly 3,500 nudges. They arrive in the tools people already use, including Slack, Teams, email, and mobile, which is what lets them reach the roughly 80% of the global workforce that does not sit at a desk.
The reason delivery matters is that reinforcement decays without it. Researchers Haunstrup and Jensen (2024) ran a field experiment showing that training paired with just-in-time nudges produced durable behavior change measured eight months later, while training alone did not. A development session teaches the behavior; nudges in the flow of work keep it active long enough to become a habit. Activate is the second pillar of the People Activation System, and alongside the AI Coach and the standard nudge library, it features the piece I used most: a generator for building custom nudges tied to a specific business need.
I started with the business objective rather than the content. Before opening the platform, I thought through which behaviors I wanted to reinforce and why, and I made sure each topic tied directly to a business priority, an upcoming program, or a point in our listening cycle where reinforcement would matter most. Starting from the objective did more for nudge quality than anything else I tried. When I was specific about the behavior and why it mattered, the generated nudges needed little editing; when I was vague, they came back too generic-sounding.
Executive presence served as an early topic. We had a development session focused on presence and visibility, and several Pyxers were heading to a conference to present research and thought leadership. Nudge targeting works at the leadership level, meaning individual contributors, managers, and managers of managers, rather than by named cohort, so I wrote presence nudges that would resonate broadly. Presence is relevant across levels and functions, and writing for a wide audience kept the behavior universally actionable.
Succession planning was a second priority. Identifying and developing future talent is the kind of work leaders know matters and quietly deprioritize when the week gets busy. I wanted nudges that brought succession thinking back into the everyday as a habit of noticing, naming, and investing in the people already showing potential, not a formal HR process.
AI adoption was the third, and the one I am most excited about. Employees who visibly engage with AI tools, ask questions openly, and experiment establish the conditions for their teams to follow. I drafted multiple AI nudges as a low-friction way to keep those behaviors top of mind as adoption unfolds. They are built and ready to deploy after our annual listening experience in June.
The generator does not ask you to start from a blank page. You upload one piece of relevant content per set of nudges, an article (many can be found on the blog that our experts maintain), a research report (such as from our extensive library), or an existing training resource, and the platform builds from it. Loading a single source at a time keeps each set focused.
Because we are an employee experience and learning & development company, we had strong source material already in house, and I used it deliberately. Our executive presence nudges mapped directly to content from a prior development session, which made each nudge feel like a natural extension of a program people had already attended rather than a generic tip. Using our own leadership development and Women's Impact Network materials kept the nudges anchored in language and frameworks our people already recognized, and it meant each nudge reinforced a program we had already paid for, closing the loop between a session someone sat through and the behavior we wanted to outlast it.
The platform generated three custom nudges in under two minutes — which meant I did not even have time to refill my coffee before they were ready! It also gives you the option to generate more, and to delete the ones you do not want.
What surprised me was how well the generator applied nudge theory to the source content. Rather than summarizing the article into bite-sized chunks, it reframed the ideas into actionable behavioral prompts grounded in the science of how people change, more like what a skilled coach would say than what a content algorithm would spit out. That difference is the reason to use nudges instead of clipping quotes from a deck. A summary tells you what an article said, whereas behavioral nudge tells you what to do about it on Tuesday morning.
The bulk of my time went to editing, which is exactly where I wanted to spend it. I refined the language to match the Perceptyx voice, tightened each nudge to our business context, and adjusted the behavioral anchors. The generator automatically selects three behaviors to align each nudge to, and the ability to edit both the nudge content and those underlying anchors let me get the targeting right. Once a set was edited, I published it for deployment.
Custom nudges arrive looking much like any other nudge, with one useful difference at the bottom. A transparency line explains where the nudge came from and which behavior it targets, so the recipient understands the intent behind an otherwise anonymous prompt. The executive presence nudge below is one example.
The "Why this nudge?" line names the source the nudge was built from and the organizational focus area it supports, in this case developing new skills and abilities. The response buttons and the option to start a coaching session turn a one-way message into a starting point for action.
The succession planning nudge took the same approach with a different behavior. Under the heading "Spot tomorrow's leaders today," it read:
Think of one person on your team who consistently goes beyond what's asked of them. Now ask yourself: do they know you see their potential? Identifying high-potential talent doesn't require a formal process. It can start with a single conversation. Reach out this week and let them know you notice their impact.
Why? Research shows that early talent identification creates a self-fulfilling cycle: when emerging leaders are recognized, they invest more, perform better, and stay longer, strengthening our talent pipeline before vacancies create pressure.
One takeaway, one doable action, and a reason grounded in evidence. That was the goal.
Custom nudges are prioritized in the delivery queue, so the next nudge a qualifying person receives is likely to be one of the custom ones, provided they meet the targeting criteria. Two conditions govern who qualifies: whether they sit in the right leadership-level audience, and whether they hold the relevant behavioral anchors. Nudges are not broadcast to everyone indiscriminately. They reach the people for whom the target behavior is most relevant, which is what keeps them from feeling like noise.
The engagement signal was immediate and stronger than our baseline nudge content. The clearest read came from reaction rates. As of June 3, 2026, the executive presence nudges had reached 1,042 people across all leadership levels, with a a reaction rate 11 points above average, and a separate nudge on owning unpopular decisions, sent to 40 people leaders, had a reaction rate 20 points above average. These are early, internal numbers, and our own reaction rates may sit higher than a typical organization's, but we will be running a deeper nudge impact analysis after the June listening experience and expect to understand the effects more fully then.
Reaction rate by itself understates what a nudge can do. The succession planning nudge went to a deliberately small group of 26 people leaders and drew a more modest reaction rate, yet it produced one of the clearest behavior changes we saw. Lauren Beechly, VP of Workforce Transformation, acted on hers:
I acted on my succession planning nudge! I told a leader of our consulting practice what an incredible leader he is and how much I appreciate him consistently raising the bar for how we deliver customer value and impact. I recognize people all the time, but this was a welcome nudge at the right time in my day.
Lauren's action is the kind of thing a well-targeted nudge is built to produce: a low-lift, high-value move a leader can make without rearranging the day. A recognition conversation that strengthens the talent pipeline counts for more than any particular reaction rate suggests, so we have to weigh user-described wins like this against the metrics instead of judging a topic on reactions alone. A nudge that matches what someone is already working on will drive the right actions, while a generic prompt could get dismissed as another notification.
Building these nudges taught me a few things that held true across every topic. I would pass all of them to anyone starting a custom nudge campaign.
Balance generality with specificity. Nudges can be tailored by leadership level and content, but the most effective ones feel personally relevant without being so narrow that they only work for one team. Because I could target by leadership level rather than by named group, I wrote the presence and visibility nudges for a broad audience even though they grew out of a specific program. Anchor a nudge to behaviors anyone at a given level can act on, and it reads as if it were written for the person, not for a cohort. Freshly generated nudges also tend to come out fairly general, so I edited toward sharper, more tailored language.
Keep it clear, concise, and actionable. These nudges live in the flow of work. People will not stop between meetings to read a three-paragraph reflection prompt. Aim for one takeaway, a few sentences at most, and an action that is doable in the moment. I would steer away from a "schedule a 30-minute mock presentation" nudge in favor of "add one talking point to your next 1:1 with your manager." If you would not do it yourself, do not suggest it.
Build ahead. The organizations that get the most from nudges treat them as part of their listening architecture. Survey launches and training programs are all moments where nudges extend the impact, but only if they are ready to deploy when the moment arrives. Create your custom nudges before a survey goes out, so they are waiting when action planning begins.
Match the timing to the business, not only the program. A nudge about AI curiosity is more useful when the organization is mid-rollout on a new tool, and a succession nudge is more useful during a talent review. Think about what is happening in the business and build toward those moments.
Custom nudges address one of the most persistent problems in organizational life: the gap between knowing and doing. Most organizations have strategies, programs, and data. What is harder to build are the personalized, sustained, behavioral coaching moments that make all of it stick. That is the work the Nudge Generator in Activate is built to do, and it is how we are turning our own priorities into behavior change at scale across Perceptyx.
If you want to see the full workflow with your own data, channels, and priorities, schedule a 30-minute demo. To go deeper on how reinforcement in the flow of work sustains the behaviors your programs are meant to build, explore the Activate pillar of the People Activation System and the connected work happening in Develop.