Building a strategy for colleague experience

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Two years ago I undertook an exciting new task to design products and services for colleagues in a particular section of a large retail business. I’d never designed for internal colleagues before, but it has been one of most challenging but rewarding pieces of work I’ve ever been involved in.

Along the way I’ve touched on all levels of design from micro to macro, in this article and I am going to discuss the journey our team has been on to design and implement a structured experience strategy for colleagues. A strategy that can deliver on business goals, simplify business process and remove pain for the colleagues on the ground.

Here’s how we went about it…

What’s being built and why?

When we started, we took the time to understand each product team and what they were building. We wanted to find out the implementation strategy for products across the transformation domain. This provided the context of what a colleagues role might be like when these tools are delivered.

We spoke to business stakeholders and trawled through project documentation to understand the business outcomes. We needed to learn why the investment in colleague tools, but more importantly the key outcomes from this investment and if this was realised by the proposed implementations; so we could help maximise the right outcomes in the investment being made.

Key learnings

  • Businesses asks can be well defined upfront and as a result experience is siloed from wider services used in the colleagues day to day impacting wider business efficiency
  • Experience may not considered in the implementation method for a tool or other tools in an eco system
  • Take the time to understand all the tools so that you can see what the current colleagues eco system looks like

Tools & Processes

Understand the colleague workflow

We spoke to colleagues to understand the users need, we mapped how they do their jobs and the challenges they face. A colleague’s role isn’t defined by a brief interaction with a single product. Roles, responsibilities and complex business logic from other tools, will influence their decision making. The information they require to make changes may rely on multiple insight from other tools.

Example experience map canvas
Example experience map canvas

Learnings

  • Research wider and around the defined ask, to understand the colleagues full role and detail of the business processes upstream and downstream, so that you can empathise and see opportunities to make their whole workflow better.
  • Engage colleague users in journey mapping exercises, ask them to validate where they believe the pain points are, so that all opportunities for improvement can be spotted
  • Validate these qualitative pain points with a wider survey to gather corresponding quantitative data to validate key themes found
  • Share the findings with everyone, product owners, sponsors, engineers and architects to develop a shared understand and gather momentum and buy in for improving the overall experience

Tools/processes

Thinking differently

Once we understood the business processes that exist and the big pain points, we could think differently about how these processes work. What would a world be like if there was just one consistent experience, not multiple tools?

It was critical here to think big, be bold and ideate. We demonstrated our thinking in the form of “Next” (A consolidated experience) and “Future” (A automated experience) to demonstrate a colleague experience vision and strategy.

Demonstrate clear view of where you are now and where you want to go

Learnings

  • Have a clear view of the existing projects
  • Ideate collaboratively with key stakeholders
  • Have a clear view on how any future
  • Make ”Future” thinking ideas technology agnostic to show room for evolution as tech changes
  • Make the “Next” story a prototype to bring to life an experience.
  • Make sure any stories focus on business outcomes to align with any overarching business strategy

Tools/processes

Buying into the future

We need to show how you make the vison become a permanent experience strategy. To influence the business to follow through and commit to the strategy we broke down the vision into simple capabilities and outcomes. Each outcome was in the form of a hypothesis. We demonstrated the iterative steps to show how we could move from siloed capabilities and experience to unified experiences.

Learnings

  • IT functions may be immature when it comes to focussing on journeys and outcomes not technical capability
  • Break down steps and show them how capabilities can be broken into small outcomes towards an Iterative goal
  • Show how each outcomes is measured against a business goals.
  • Identify an architect and a PO to collaborative with to move the strategy forward.

Tools/processes

  • Visual roadmap
  • Capabilities map aligned to business outcomes

Re-adjusting for success

To show a clear line between business outcomes and colleague experience strategy we created concise experience principles. We created experience measures that signalled the change in behaviour we want to see from end users. We used these measures and principles as criteria to help shape scope and outcomes of iterative deliverables

Example principles:

Example measures:

  • Adoption rate of new functionality and capability
  • Reduction time to complete key business processes
  • Increase in number of instances where colleagues are informed with insight and action outcomes in the same place

We made sure principles mapped back to business goals using a measurement framework.

Example framework:

The framework helped us identify clear hypothesis, so that we could state what experiences capabilities we needed to deliver iteratively to build our vision

Example hypothesis:

“ We believe that delivering [conceptual idea/capability] will help us to meet [Desired business outcomes]

We will know we will have achieved this when we see the following [measures/metrics be delivered]”

Finally we started to see the pivot towards a colleague experience strategy as product teams started to define roadmaps for success with iterative deliverables based around the strategy and hypotheses. If you are working on something similar here are some of the sign of success…

  • Roadmaps focus on outcomes from hypotheses
  • User journeys focus on key user needs and tasks, handing off via deep link into third capabilities at the right time.
  • Reduction in purchasing of third party “off the shelf” tools that don’t align with experience principles

I truly love designing for colleague experiences, the business processes, a company’s historic legacy and complexity of product offerings make it such a unique and intellectually stimulating challenge. It’s only 2 years in but we are finally starting to the see our efforts pay off.

Our team and I are excited about the challenges ahead, following through on our colleague experience strategy and expanding it to wider areas of colleague roles around the business. I’ll share an update in a year or so to tell you how we got on.

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Sainsbury’s Customer Experience Design
Sainsbury’s Customer Experience Design

Published in Sainsbury’s Customer Experience Design

We’re a team of designers, researchers, writers, accessibility specialists and more. We collectively create the easiest, most enjoyable experiences that better serve Sainsbury’s customers’ ever changing needs. These stories take you behind the scenes of the experiences we create.

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