Understanding the employee problem

Blog 2/10

If you’re thinking of using design thinking to solve an employee problem, my biggest word of advice would be get used to the feeling of unfamiliarity. From looking at internal career data including; attrition, internal mobility and engagement, we know we need to try something different in the Career Development space. But we’re not clear on what problem we need to solve just yet, or if there’s a clear answer to solve it.

To give us an introduction to design thinking, our core team, along with some of our key stakeholders in HR and in the business, got together to take part in a morning session of Design Thinking Immersion led by Treehouse Innovation. And the session was as cool as it sounds! We were split into teams and had to work through the six steps of design thinking to solve a case study.

The afternoon was spent applying learnings from the morning to our own problem. We had conversations about our problem statement (also known as a ‘How Might We’ statement) and started thinking about who we could interview as part of the field research. The afternoon felt a little more messy, unfamiliar and challenging. On reflection, unsurprising when trying to work through a problem with no clear answer!

Since discussing the problem statement in the session, we’ve revisited it a couple of times, sense-checking it with our key stakeholders and we’ve landed on:

“How might we help employees develop a fulfilling career?”

At times it’s felt like we’ve been going around in circles. But this is ok, and it’s actually a really important part of the design thinking process. We need to get the problem statement right at the beginning, so that when we jump into gathering research, we’re asking the right questions to solve the right problem.

Next week, we’ll be learning new interview techniques to help inspire different thinking when interviewing our customers.