Helping people get jobs through design: a story from the Swedish Public Employment Service
Netta Korhonen, an alumnus of Design for Government course at Aalto University, has been working as a service designer for the Swedish Public Employment Service (Arbetsförmedlingen) since January 2017. With roughly 14 thousand employees all over Sweden, the agency provides services for jobseekers and employers alike ranging from job advertisements to trainings. The team is called, the Department for Customer-Driven Development (Sektionen Kunddriven verksamhetsutveckling).
Initiated in 2013 with only 3 members, the team closely worked with a design consultancy, Transformator Design (now part of itch!). Together, they created a method called “the Greenhouse Model” (Växthus in Swedish). The model prescribes a team of designers and public servants to get together to define a discreet problem to tackle, while also involving three local offices to build prototypes and test them. This model has been extremely well received all over the agency, and now gets recognised as one of the most important achievements of the team. The method has also received national and international awards, such as Service Design S award for “Systematic and cultural change in the public sector” and SDN Award in 2016.
After having produced such achievements, the team has got a permanent tenure and how consists of 10 members, including the leader, service designers and customer experience analysts, and civil servants who had gone through some intensive service design training. According to Netta, having public servants in the team is crucial in navigating the complexity of the public organisation to prepare and deliver services in concert.
Recent outcomes the team has produced include the “Language Stairs (Språktrappan)”. Having observed frontline workers of local offices and also talking to potential employers, the teams discovered that setting up a clear language requirement was a crucial part for employment of immigrants. The research showed that even though many of the employers listed Swedish skills as the number one priority, the level needed varied all the way from just being able to chat in the coffee shop to being able work in a call centre. The job advertisements often were missing this information, or had unclear requirements, which caused both sides waste time and made it difficult to find the right candidates swiftly.
The language ladder is an example of a basic tool developed together with the civil servants and quickly tested in the local offices. It is a simple visualisation that makes it easier to understand the varying requirements and help start a discussion with an employer looking for new staff members. The aim is to both make sure that the employer gets the right selection of candidates and possibly lower the language requirements by opening up a discussion.
Another recent project the team carried out was a study about how different managers and heads of departments experience the internal leadership and steering processes. While being a hierarchical and traditional public organisation, the current leadership has been working hard to establish more bottom-up approaches into the steering efforts. Through a design research focusing on the experience of the middle managers at different levels of organisation, the team was able to gain a holistic picture on how the current steering model actually works in real-life, while also identifying the underlying problem areas as a basis for the further development. Presented to the highest leadership of the organisation, the findings were not only well-received but also created much interest towards the methods and helped open up service design methodology for a wider range of development initiatives in the organisation. The study will continue with co-designing phase of the new steering model together with the managers and employers from different parts of the organisation.
The team has recently has gone through a structural change that would hopefully help integrate design expertise into the broader organisation of the Swedish Public Employment Service. this means in practice that the team is being split up to smaller units and integrated to various parts of the organisation to speed up the cycle of research, testing and implementation. On the next post, I discuss with Netta about the ins and outs of how her team works, and the broader context within which her team operates.
This post briefly explored two projects of the Department for Customer-Driven Development. In my next post, I sit down with Netta to hear about her experience in working for the Public Employment Service, and how her team is navigating through the big and nationwide organisation.
This post was originally written and published in two parts in Korean (part I & part II) for Design Press, a joint venture between Monthly Design magazine and a portal & search engine in Korea, Naver.
