In June, we introduced our Health Safety program to set a policy that reinforced public health best practices. We continue to do more work in this area to help keep our community safe and fight COVID-19. In this post, we’d like to share with you how we have approached maximizing compliance on our platform.

The purpose of a policy is to set clear rules and expectations. The goal is maximum compliance with the smallest amount of additional effort exerted from the community. In the case of Health Safety, successful compliance with our policy means that people can transport themselves more safely during the pandemic and protect their communities.

These are the steps we took to establish our policy and increase compliance:

1. Clearly stated the policy and required affirmative acknowledgement.
2. Frequently reminded all users of the policy.
3. Validated compliance via user reports and checks.
4. Provided corrective feedback for those who didn’t comply.
5. Penalized those who repeatedly failed to comply with our policies.

The first two are our educational efforts and the last three are part of our compliance program. Each step is critical because it informs the community, gets their buy in, and makes it clear that this policy is enforced. Unsurprisingly, we have seen that enforcing the policy reduces repeat offenses in a meaningful way.

This graphic lays out how we have brought these steps to life. Overall, our mask compliance is significantly above the national average. We are always improving, but we have a strong baseline.

Our approach is informed by the following principles:

1. Most people will comply with sensible a policy if it’s clear.
2. Repetition facilitates memory. Memory facilitates compliance.
3. We need to solve for those who won’t comply to ensure trust in the policy.
4. Compliance can be motivated via deterrence.
5. Deterrence is based on the perception of possible punitive actions.
6. There needs to be actual punitive actions, both to validate perception and to minimize repeat violations of the policy.

While principles #1 and #2 inform the strategy for most people (education), #3–6 are why we have checks, feedback, and punitive enforcement. We would like to penalize as few people as possible, and when we have to, to do so fairly*. This is the inverse of a growth funnel — we hope to reach compliance without having to get to the punitive step. However, in line with our goal of prioritizing the safety of our entire Lyft community, we have to penalize bad behavior in order to create deterrence and to remove those who won’t ever comply with our policies.

Safety is critical to healthy communities, and now more than ever. We hope that sharing our approach inspires ideas to help other communities as well.

*The fairness aspect is important, and we make sure to build our systems to minimize any fraudulent reports.