Design thinking experimented in improving employee experience
Design thinking methods are widely in use for improving customer experience and in getting into the roots of real customer needs. In order to develop something customers will love and enjoy using, we first need to understand what key challenges they are facing and how we can smoothen the experiences. This requires empathic methods, oftentimes referred as design thinking.
These same methods are being used more actively nowadays also when improving employee experience and removing obstacles from hindering productive and engaging work and working environment within an organization. According to Accenture Strategy article (1), “An optimized CX (customer experience) generates loyalty and additional sales. A stellar EX (employee experience) attracts talent, boosts workforce engagement, productivity and retention. This in turn directly improves a business’ financial performance.”
Isn’t that a reason enough to start paying attention to superior employee experience?
At Fortum, as a part of our Open Leadership and Strategy project we experimented with design thinking methods in order to improve our employee experience. We wanted to try out and showcase how these methods could be used in practice and see whether they could support HR work in the future. The answer was a resounding yes: the methods were found to be both successful and inspiring.
In this blog post I’ll share the method we tested out and the key learnings and next steps in our organization.
Step 1: Setting the goals and the scene
In short, the aim of our employee experience journey project was to test out qualitative design thinking method in identifying areas of improvement in employee experience and to experiment to find out whether method would be beneficial for HR.
We decided to focus on the moments that leave a memory trace behind, moments that matter the most to the employees.
We knew that within the short time and resources we had available within the project, we would not be able to run an extended research to study all the details of the complete employee journey in Fortum based on segmentation. But we did not want that to become an obstacle for realization of the experiment either. Therefore, we decided to focus on the moments that leave a memory trace behind, moments that matter the most to the employees. This was also intentional because today’s workforces are more complex than they used to be; demographics-based segmentation does not help in the environment where workforces are made up of diverse types of workers — ranging from traditional full-time and part-time employees to contractors and freelancers. The extended workforce also comprises multiple generations and includes diverse locations or regions. All in all, it makes sense to focus on individual moments that matter rather than individual employee types or segments. Especially since the power of an emotional moment can be enormous for an individual.
Step 2: Sketching out the employee journey
We started the definition of our employee journey by exploring the existing literature and using a generic employee journey as our baseline. We utilized the steps or phases described by Denise Lee Yohn in Harvard Business Review (2) as our main starting point.
The 10 steps of empowered employee journey include:
- sourcing and recruiting
- pre-boarding
- onboarding (orientation and initial training)
- compensation and benefits
- ongoing learning and development
- ongoing engagement, communication, and community involvement
- rewards and recognition
- performance planning, feedback, and review
- advancement
- retirement, termination, or resignation
These steps served as a useful framework to map the moments that matter, based on our internally conducted interviews.
Step 3: Planning and conducting face-to-face interviews
Next we planned a series of short face-to-face interviews with Fortum employees of diverse divisions, countries, ages and genders. We had a project group supporting us with the interviews. Therefore, it was especially important to have a structured interview guide that would ensure systematic data collection. In principal, we asked the interviewees to simply share their stories and the moments that mattered the most to them during their employee journey at Fortum, as well as describe the feelings these moments evoked in them. We encouraged the interviewees to share both positive and negative moments and supported the discussion with qualitative open-ended questions.
It was great to see how openly people were willing to share their experiences as well as how much they appreciated when someone was truly listening to their thoughts and experiences. A true example of empathy.
Step 4: Mapping the gathered data along the employee journey
To map the collected data, we organized a space for two days. Interviewers were able to pop in during the given time frame with their data printouts, and map the gathered data together with core research team.
We used employee journey as a frame to map all moments that matter to our employees. For the sake of clarity, we created two identical employee journeys, one for the positive moments and the other one for the negative moments.
When we analyzed the data, we happily noticed that the number of both positive and negative key moments were almost equal to each other. In other words, people seemed to remember both the moments of great contentment and happiness as well as ultimate dissatisfaction.
We were also able to identify some of the key feelings from the data. The key positive feelings were feeling of being trusted and getting inspired, while the key negative ones included feelings such as frustration and being uninterested.
Some of the other positive feelings that were mentioned included the feeling of being energized, the feeling of being included and in control, being heard, as well as happiness and balance. On the other hand, some of the mentioned negative feelings were disappointment, the feeling of not being important, being fooled, wasted time, not being empowered, not being included, decreased morale and trust, fear, stress, hate, unfairness, and indifferences.
These latter feelings were definitely something we would like to avoid in our organization to ensure the full commitment and wellbeing of our work force.
Step 5: Presenting the results to Leadership
After our employee journey was successfully mapped, a final important part of the project was ahead of us: presenting the key findings to our company leadership and discussing the suitability of our method. As this project started as part of the leadership program, approaching top management was easy. To visualize our key findings, we prepared some key take-outs from the different moments that matter to our interviewees along their employee journeys and presented the whole spectrum of the realities currently in the organization.
Our work was received with great enthusiasm since it was something new than what the management had previously seen; employee satisfaction is often measured with quantitative surveys with predefined questions. These quantitative approaches do not usually allow employees to bring up the key moments that matter the most to them.
Step 6: Following the next steps
Too often experiments and projects such as our employee journey mapping stay as one-time trials. However, this time we were delighted to see that the method was taken into real-life use in our organization and was taken into Open Leadership Must-Win-Battle. Similar study than our pre-study has been already conducted within one part of our organization and the results are being used in educating the managers helping them to build a greater level of empathy towards their team members.
And, as I’m writing this blog post — several months after the initial project — I have also been reached out from another part of our organization to tell more about the method and how to use it to increase engagement. Could not be more eager to share and support!
Key learnings — with great empathy comes great results
So, what did we learn? Listing here at the end still the key takeaways from our experiment and the actions in the company afterwards.
- Using an employee-driven qualitative method itself creates empathy; employees feel like they are truly being heard.
- Having multiple interviewers ease the burden of conducting interviews but…
- … training the interviewers for the interviews is extremely important to ensure coherency of the technique and findings.
- Using company internal interviewers create engagement towards the findings but…
- …when selecting interviewers, it’s important to have people who are comfortable with approaching others with empathy, even if not professional interviewers.
- To ensure the freedom of speech and minimize social biases, the interviewer and the interviewee should not have a professional power relationship (e.g. manager and their employee).
- In the case of having multiple interviewers in the project, easy to pop-in and well facilitated debriefing workshop makes mapping the data and analysis lighter for both the research core group as well as for the interviewers.
- Finally, it is possible to get new methods and techniques injected into the company processes when you simply create a good example and pave the path! Then let others run and try out themselves and stay as supporting hand.
It often feels that in order to learn about something, one must venture outside and expose themselves to things they’ve never seen. However, these kinds of projects and work show that learning does not necessarily mean going outside the organization. Listening to the employees, mapping out their experiences, and studying their overall employee experiences are invaluable in determining your employees’ wellbeing, motivation, as well as performance. To improve on any of these areas or on the company’s performance overall, listening, understanding and acting on it is vital. And same tools can be used than for improving customer experience!
References:
(1) “Employee Experience Reimagined” by Michael Liley, Patricia Feliciano, Alex Laurs, Accenture Strategy
(2) “Design Your Employee Experience as Thoughtfully as You Design Your Customer Experience” by Denise Lee Yohn (2016)
*Fortum is a leading clean-energy company developing and offering solutions for our global customers in electricity, heating, cooling, as well as solutions to improve resource efficiency. Digitalization is enabling us to create new customer offerings and improve the productivity of our businesses. See more on www.fortum.com
