Encouraging Greater Interaction & Kindness on London Buses
Next up in our legacy series: Encouraging Greater Interaction and Kindness on London Buses.
Frontline workers are a crucial part of local infrastructure – they help care for us, keep our streets clean, keep our supermarkets full, get us from place to place and much more. They are also a key touchpoint of connection for many people in our communities, particularly those who may live alone or be more isolated. Our Essential Mix project, funded by the National Lottery Community Fund and carried out between 2022 and 2024, sought to encourage more and better connections between residents with the frontline workers in their communities. In this project we identified bus drivers as a key point of contact for people from all backgrounds and worked with Transport for London and bus operators across the London network to think about how passengers and drivers could be encouraged to have more positive interactions with one another (a greeting, a thank you, a smile).
OUR APPROACH:
We conducted research with passengers and drivers to understand potential blockers to engagement and then worked with drivers to co-design some potential low cost, impactful interventions to encourage greater engagement from/with passengers on their bus.
Some key learnings from the initial research into blockers to engagement were that:
- Many drivers felt unseen by passengers, and that the majority didn’t look up from their phones to acknowledge them upon entering their bus
- Many passengers felt unsure if drivers wanted to be engaged with/greeted
- The majority of passengers claimed to greet their driver when boarding the bus but felt that others did not – an interesting social norm, with people believing that the majority of passengers did not engage
We leveraged these insights to develop and implement simple signage on buses that encourages passengers to greet or thank their drivers, addressing some of these barriers by highlighting that drivers do want to be greeted/thanked and demonstrating that this was the norm.
These signs were trialled on more than 150 buses in West London in Aug 2023 and the impact of these signs on behaviour measured with a team of researchers conducting observations aboard buses over a two week period.
OUR RESULTS
- The initial trial found that passengers on buses with signs installed with significantly more likely to engage with their driver on entering the bus than those without – a jump from 23 to 30%
- The 7% jump translates into a further potential 140 million more positive connections annually
- This trial was replicated in North, East and South London in 2024 and similar results were found
This indicates that simple, low cost interventions at the point of interaction can encourage significantly more positive engagement from passengers towards bus drivers. This small change can make a positive change in drivers’ experiences at work and in relationships between passengers and drivers aboard the bus.
CONCLUSION
Whilst this trial occurred only in a bus setting, it has wider reaching potential. A simple tool to encourage greater kindness and more positive interaction with frontline staff could apply to many other contexts – shops, post offices, banks etc.
In our busy day to day lives, it’s easy to forget that a small moment of positive connection can change somebody’s day. We hope that the findings of this trial can encourage more thoughtful consideration from employers around how their staff might be supported and for customers/communities to think about how they can engage more positively with the frontline workers who help to keep their world spinning.
Read more in our report here.