Service Design for People & Culture: Employee-centric Experience Design in Onboarding
Through recent developments, the emphasis on service design practices in the business sphere has been increasing. Dogma Alares not only strives to provide the best consultancy with strong expertise on service design pillar but also approaches employee experiences and internal processes with the same vision.
Service design practices lead to effective solutions that make a distinction in many areas, also in the field of People & Culture. At Dogma Alares, Service Design and People & Culture teams worked in an integrated manner to realize an Employee Experience project, which was carried out to improve and optimize employee experience during onboarding processes. Making the most of internal expertise, we achieved great results for the Dogma Alares team.
Months after the establishment of Dogma Alares, our growth coincided with the pandemic circumstances and most of our members joined us in a remote setup. Although the onboarding experience was quite positive according to the survey results, working remotely created some shortcomings. We focused on solving these shortcomings by running an employee experience design sprint throughout the project by integrating service design perspective with people & culture practices.
During the employee experience design sprint, the onboarding journey of a new Dogma Alares team member has been assessed through surveys and in-depth interviews. 81% of the Dogma Alares team contributed to the online survey, and 92% of the planned in-depth interviews were accomplished in the next stage. Moreover, team members from each pillar and role contributed to the sprint. Pain and gain points have been determined and through workshops, a cross-pillar team has been developed solutions to create a much better onboarding experience for their future teammates.
After analysing the pain and gain points, an ideation workshop was held to ideate and design to eliminate pain points and improve gain points. Throughout the workshop, the problem statement was validated and then the team brainstormed. At the next step, the ideas were grouped and prioritized by categories such as “human-centric, quickly applicable, or takes time & creates impact”. The last step of the workshop was creating story boards describing the implementation.
Our “Buddy System” at Dogma Alares, which was created by the Talent Squad as one of the first people processes, proved to be one of the top gain points. Another gain point is our Knowledge Center which is the platform where newcomers can access to any information about Dogma Alares such as cultural principles, team norms, trainings, policies, and tools. Conversely, after it became obvious that the newcomers who joined in the remote setup had a significant demand to meet as fast as possible new people within the organization, it has been decided to increase the communication frequency and social activities by creating a new channel on our internal communication tool to share online activity and event ideas. It has been aimed to enhance the onboarding journey of a new Dogma Alares member not only by solving the pain points but also by improving the gain points.
The future of work is combining service design approaches with people & culture practices, and that is an additional illustration of what makes Dogma Alares a great place to work.
Sinem Nehir & Kumsal Kurt
