Ethics and Employee Experience Design
How to experiment with people and not on them
2018 is the year we realised that with power comes responsibility. Previously we had been given free reign to play with teams, to change how they experienced work and to redesign how they went about their daily tasks, in some ways we felt like puppet masters.
“ If we try this will we change how they respond?” we frequently asked ourselves as we introduced subtle nudges to the teams we were working with.
As human beings first and designers second we always assume we act in the best interests of those we are designing for, however this has never been explicitly articulated before. What are our principles of ethical design? Are these understood by all of us in our team, by the people who hire us to improve their teams, and by the teams themselves?
In the past we were often told that teams felt they were guinea pigs in our learning, as we trialed things on them “to provoke the system”, so we decided that we need to be explicit about our experience design ethics.
Now we share them with everyone upfront.
As designers of anything, you have the ability to influence how people experience this (whether its a product, service, system, platform or place), and as a result of that experience, how they are in turn influenced as humans. We’ve been down too many journeys that have been designed to manipulate behaviour,(ahem LinkedIn/the bank that encourages you to switch to them mid-transaction with the button on the right/the social media platform that has stolen years of time from us with its addictive scrolling function etc.).
At Inquisition we’re trying to change that by encouraging the design world to start acknowledging their principles to ensure the humanity of people is embedded in the outcome of the desired journey, mitigating unintended negative consequences.
So here are some of our principles for ethical employee experience design:
We share these with clients we work with, and with the individuals in teams we work with upfront in our How-we-work Guide.
- We don’t impose design: we do not believe in imposing change on groups of people, we work with them so that they are able to be agents of change.
- We are participatory: teams undergoing change should be involved in their own collective improvement and included in the design process. Our nudges are co-created and actively taken up by the teams we work with.
- We are transparent: learning has to be distributed to be effective, we are not spies and gain no value in harbouring information from teams. We share everything. We don’t name and shame anyone and we anonymise all our data but the data is there for everyone to see, in a way that allows them to get context. (It’s not just for Exco Presentations and reports.)
- We are humane, and human: interactions with our team emphasise human qualities: they are designed to create psychological safety, to understand the value of empathy and even compassion, to encourage relationships to be built or adapted based on individual needs.
- The team, even over the Exco: We bat for the people whose experience we have been brought in to enhance. We listen to the leadership, and we work with them (and within the parameters they define for us) but ultimately our main metric of success is if the teams of people we work with have better relationships with their co-workers, and produce better work, with more meaning.
These may seem obvious but for us it helps give clarity and make better decisions about what we work on, who we work with and how we design interventions for humans.
Some Ethics Tests to try:
At Pixel Up! 2018 5 useful ethics tests were offered by Cennydd Bowles, as part of his talk titled *Future Ethics* which we wanted to share as you think about your own work:
- Is this fair behind the “veil of ignorance”?
- Would I be proud for this to be a front-page story?
- Am I maximising happiness for the greatest number?
- Am I treating people as ends or means?
- What if everyone did what I’m about to do?
If you’d like some help identifying your design principles please give us a shout at crew@inquisition.co.za and we’ll work with you on defining your own principles, or steal ours and use them in your work.
Check out others who are exploring ethical design here:
