Fjord Trends look back: 2016
Fifteen years of making business and design predictions, but how do our thoughts through the years seem to us now?
Fjord Trends 2022 will be our fifteenth report into what’s coming up for the business and design industries. To celebrate this milestone, we’ve asked some of our leadership team to pick out one trend from each of the past 15 years, to share their own thoughts and to ponder how things have panned out since. This is part nine.
This episode our Fjord Trends 2022 countdown is all about 2016 and it’s written by Emma Carpenter, Head of Design Experience, Africa and Group Director at Fjord Johannesburg, South Africa.
As with everything, context is king, so let’s set the scene for the year leading up to launch, with some cultural references that might take you right back. An attack on Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris led to #IAmCharlie, NASA found flowing water on Mars, and Facebook’s user numbers reached a billion. Powerhouse television drama, “Empire” debuted , “Hamilton” blazed its way onto stages worldwide, and Caitlyn Jenner came out as transgender with an iconic Annie Liebowitz photograph on the cover of Vanity Fair.
Over to Emma…
My favorite trend: B2WE
By Emma Carpenter
What we said back then…
As demand grows for best-in-class experiences in our private lives, the same level of service can be expected in the workplace. Simply put, employees now expect tailored experiences, fast evolution and personal connection in their careers. As a result, we are seeing the emergence of employee experience (EX) design, where workplace processes, structure and culture are all reimagined at an organizational level.
Employee experience was consecutively referenced in five Fjord Trends reports, and it all started with B2WE in 2016. Just a year earlier, it emerged as the fastest-growing category of work at Fjord, and by 2020 we had dedicated an entire discipline of our practice to it, relabelled “Culture By Design”.
After 16 years in traditional creative agencies, the idea of focusing on employee experience blew my mind. Suddenly, all the B2C work I’d been doing up to that point felt half-finished — in my ignorance, I hadn’t designed for the feelings and activities of the people who were behind the scenes, bringing my work to life. A great customer experience is supported by a great employee experience. Put it another way: how can you expect to grow and retain customers if you can’t retain your in-house talent?
This trend opened my eyes to a whole new dimension of service design, and it wasn’t long until it played a dominant role in one of my projects…
We met a lady called Constance in the middle of an 80-interview research marathon with employees and HR managers. The corporate benefits team of a South African insurer wanted to know why their client’s employees were cashing out retirement savings when they resigned. Constance told us she had used it to pay loans and school fees, with little or no employee experience around pensions, she had no idea of the tax deductions or long-term impact on her future. We realized she (and many others) saw retirement funds as a savings account for short-term debt.
We used the thinking behind B2WE and infused it with an educational, financial experience in the workplace to create an award-winning piece of work to “Solve the South African Retirement Crisis”. By defining a tailored service for internal employees, B2WE kicked off our studio’s multi-year journey into designing, piloting and launching experiences across the world of corporate employee benefits. With 94% of South Africans unable to support themselves in retirement, Constance inspired us to help employees preserve their pensions, and helped our insurer retain substantial lost funds.
B2WE was truly transformative at the time and has continued to be relevant ever since and, for that reason and many more, it’s my favorite trend from 2016.
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