Design at the Swedish Public Employment Service: an interview with Netta Korhonen
The previous post introduced the Department for Customer-Driven Development (Sektionen Kunddriven verksamhetsutveckling) at the Swedish Public Employment Service (Arbetsförmedlingen), where one of the alumni of Design for Government, Netta Korhonen, works as a service designer. In this post, I discuss with Netta about the ins and outs of how her team works, and the broader context within which her team operates.
Seungho Park-Lee (SPL) I am so impressed by the work your team has been doing at the Swedish Public Employment Service. How has your experience been there so far?
Netta Korhonen (NK) It has been really positive. When I first landed here, I was very impressed by the Greenhouse method, and how well received it is within the whole agency. With roughly 14 thousand employees all over Sweden, it is a massive organisation that deals with the whole Swedish population. So the fact that the team managed to convince the organisation and its staff to embrace new ways of working is very impressive. The idea of the method is to have a good mix of people with different expertise, and not only that, involving those public servants who are the owners of the problems, who understands the bureaucracy, and who knows how to pull different strings, has been invaluable.
SPL Great. How has the team been evolving over the years?
NK I have been here only 1,5 years, so I cannot say for the whole history in detail, but I know that the team was initiated in 2013 as a project. The project had a 3-year tenure and it got extended after that. Now, we are a permanent team of 10, and hiring new staff.
SPL That’s amazing! I think your team is one of the first design and innovation teams that has a permanent status, if not the first. Are there other teams like that in Swedish government?
NK There are other innovation teams, but when it comes to working with service design there are not that many. The Swedish Social Insurance Agency (Försäkringskassan) to my knowledge has a permanent team and other public organisations are in the process of hiring service designers. We are however unique in the way we work, engaging the whole organisation in the innovation and development. Then there is CurioCity in in Helsinborg, but that is also an experimental office with a set time period. All in all, we’re lucky to have the permanent status.
SPL What are some of the challenges you’ve been experiencing as a team with such status?
NK We are currently in the middle of an organisational change. Our team has become separated into smaller teams and integrated into three different parts of the organisation, two of which are working with developing services for jobseekers and employers, and one that is focusing on more strategical development. Plan is that the new positions will help us work more closely with the others in the organisation, but we are also little bit worried about the change.
We are a hierarchical organisation with silos and established conventions to do things, which always creates challenges. As it is often the case, our biggest challenges relate to implementation and collaboration cross the organisational departments. Even with the effective Greenhouse method to develop and test services hands-on in the local offices we have difficulties in ensuring deploying the new ideas or concepts in the whole nationwide organisation.
SPL How are you dealing with to overcome those challenges?
NK The challenge of getting things implemented is a fascinating one, one that the whole service design profession is trying to deal with. In our team, we thought before that the problems with implementation depended on us failing to engage the project owners enough to create ownership on the created service concepts, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. The real reason seems to be some kind of combination of other challenges; vagueness of structures and processes for implementation, lack of experience in implementing new solutions, culture, internal politics, roles and responsibilities, overall carelessness… Something we are only beginning to tackle!
SPL That is an interesting insight, that the challenge is not as simple as “better engagement”. Can you share some future plans that you have for your team?
NK Right now we are working to get several other public organisations to join us in a big, system level Greenhouse project! The plan is to look at what goes wrong in the whole adult education system from a human point of view, and that is something not only one organisation can fix.
SPL Thank you Netta, it was great talking to you, and I am so happy to see you and your team thrive. I’ll be looking forward to our talk next time.
NK Thank you. Likewise.
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.
