Connecting the Dots: The Key to Successful Employee Experience Design
In the world of service design, success often hinges on the ability to connect the dots. Connecting the dots is more than just a metaphor; it’s a fundamental approach to creating exceptional experiences. To illustrate the significance of this approach, we’ll delve into the role of service designers as ‘connectors’ in this blog.
Our project
Improving the experience of its people is a goal of British Red Cross’ Strategy 2030. Five months ago, I joined British Red Cross as a Senior Service Designer and there began the Employee Experience Design project.
This role involves delving deep into the layers of data and feedback about our employees’ experiences. Our mission is to unearth the root causes of issues, pinpoint the elements that bring about moments of delight, and leverage this valuable research to craft and experiment with improvements to our employees’ services.
This is no small feat, given the diverse workforce of nearly 4,000 employees, each with unique daily experiences. Moreover, it’s no secret that roles, responsibilities, and processes within British Red Cross confront factors that are common to most large organisations — departmental silos and organisational complexity.
The project requires a systematic approach. We connect the dots one step at a time, focusing on specific opportunity areas within the employee journey to build a more detailed understanding of the overall employee experience. As we piece together our evidence, we’ll identify recurring patterns and themes to challenge the core problems effectively, ensuring that our improvements are not just surface-level fixes but address the fundamental issues that impact our employees.
After months of rigorous research and relationship-building, our first opportunity area came into focus: career progression. Here is what we did next:
1. Building trust through connection
As you might expect, when career progression was identified as a priority area, our initial step was to identify the people involved in the design and delivery of services that influence employees’ career growth. These people juggle multiple priorities within their work streams and are often time-poor, making collaboration a challenge.
To engage with these stakeholders more effectively, I scheduled 16 one-on-one conversations across 11 teams. These one-on-ones, being relatively short and easier to accommodate than workshops or focus groups, also set the foundation for trust-based relationships, as there is a better chance for them to be heard. Trust also sets the foundation for long-term and more time-intensive engagement.
2. Systems mapping
Halfway through the one-on-ones, we knew enough about the world of career progression to build a systems map . A systems map visualises the intricate web of touchpoints, processes, and stakeholders involved in generating experiences. They’re helpful tools when working in a complex environment because they shift our focus from separate, siloed delivery functions (like Pay and Reward, or Learning and Development), to integrated services influencing the experience of the employee.
Ben Whitter, author of ‘Employee Experience Strategy’ advocates for systems thinking, stating, “Connecting the dots necessitates thinking beyond individual components and considering the system as a whole.”
Service designers analyse how changes in one area might ripple through the entire ecosystem. By making these interdependencies visible, we can start to demystify the experiences of employees and promote cross-functional collaboration, ensuring that every feature of the ‘back stage’ works in tandem to deliver a unified and exceptional experience on the ‘front stage’ for employees.
Our colleagues’ response to the map was testimony to this possibility, as we heard them say, “I didn’t realise how wide [career progression] was” and “REALLY helpful to see this all in one place…also highlights how hard this could be for people to navigate”.
3. Collaboration
Creating system maps isn’t without its challenges. Service designers sometimes hesitate to create them because the end result often gets filed away and forgotten. To overcome this, we made the mapping process a team sport. We involved stakeholders in the creation of the systems map during the remaining half of the one-on-one interviews.
As Whitter highlights, “Connecting the dots requires collaboration among various departments, breaking down silos to create a unified experience.”
We also sent out weekly updates on our research activities and findings, to an even wider group of stakeholders with an interest or influence in the world of career progression. We’re testing which communication channels are most effective at getting engagement by embedding bit.ly links into messages and tracking the click-through rates. So far, our most effective channel has been 25-minute ‘Show and Tells’.
When co-creating and sharing the map, we intentionally left it looking incomplete. As a rule, if you want people to give you honest feedback, make things that look unfinished, imperfect — generally a bit scrappy. If it looks like a polished final product, people hold back from sharing their full perspective. In the complex world of employee experiences, where multiple factors influence outcomes, embracing the inherently messy nature of systems maps proved beneficial.
Our next step
Now that we have gained insight into the current landscape of career progression within the British Red Cross, our next phase involves closely engaging with our employees, actively listening to their experiences, and getting a firsthand view of career progression from the ‘front stage.’
Within our organisational constraints, our focus will be on enhancing existing products and services rather than creating new ones. Our aim is to collaborate with local teams in sifting through the multitude of career progression opportunities already available. This collaborative effort will involve pinpointing those opportunities that can have the most substantial positive impact on our employees and subsequently enhancing these services to better align with their needs. It’s important to recognize that these constraints offer us an invaluable opportunity to uncover the root causes of any issues and prioritise the necessary systemic changes within the current network of services.
Your next step
Interested in systems thinking? Check out this article for more tools and tricks or this course by IDEO.
Crafting a seamless employee journey
In the world of service design, connecting the dots is not just a task; it’s a guiding philosophy. It empowers us to create experiences that transcend individual touchpoints and departments. It encourages collaboration, systems thinking, and stakeholder engagement, weaving these threads into a tapestry of meaningful transformation.
Ultimately, this philosophy propels us toward a future where every employee’s journey at the British Red Cross is not just improved, it’s continuously improving.
