Employee centred goals setting — how the UX team at Ipsos MORI are approaching personal development

At most organisations there’s some kind of tool which is used to log and track progress against goals. These may have been set months ago. The year ticks on, appraisal time arrives and reviewing our progress can feel like a box ticking exercise. Perhaps we’ve changed in the time between setting those goals and reflecting back on them? Perhaps the goals have lost their meaning and relevance? Perhaps they were framed to avoid potential failure, in which case, how have they helped us to learn and grow?

At Ipsos MORI, we have a remit to make our goals.

• actionable and specific
• address gaps in our experience
• stretch us
• align with our careers
• motivate us
• align with where our team is heading.

These requirements make sense as isolated concepts, however they may also feel like floating bits of a larger puzzle, that puzzle being us, complex people and who we are , as researchers and beyond that. Understanding what our underlying needs and motivations might be so we can be as great as we want to be, seems to be a step in itself.

Separate to this, in the past, I’ve noticed barriers to people-first development like

• wordy performance criteria, shared by senior management, and then interpreted by everyone else
• hard to action feedback in 360 appraisals — person x is so [insert adjective]
• confusion around how goals align with other peoples — am I being under ambitious / overambitious? Why does this goal even matter?

With this in mind myself and Rhiannon, my colleague in the Ipsos MORI UX team, challenged ourselves to take a user centred approach to defining our goals this year, using the classic empathise- define and ideate - test and learn steps to guide our personal development journeys.

• in the inspire phase — where we are right now — we are understanding more about ourselves through immersive activities involving LEGO Serious Play in weekly reflection meetings. We are combining this with skills mapping excercises from the Research Ops Community
• In the ideation phase we’ll review and discuss various ‘how might I’ type statements and explore how these align to what our team and our clients need. We’ll then brainstorm tactics to address these
• in the learn and iterate phase we’ll try ideas out and review how they’re going at regular intervals. If we fail then we learnt something fast.

In coming week’s we’ll share reflections on how this process is going and what we’re learning, both about ourselves and the process. We’ll also be doing a talk about it on April 17, which you can sign up to here — https://www.bigmarker.com/tech-circus-tv/UX-Crunch-at-Home-A-User-Centred-Approach-to-Setting-Goals

This isn’t rocket science and I’m convinced that other research teams are probably trying similar methods. We’d love to hear what’s working for you if this is the case.