Improving the ‘new employee’ journey using service design: case study
Part 3 of 3: Reflections from learners participating in Service Design in Practice
Service Design in Practice is a six month immersive learning and development programme which takes people with little or no experience of ‘Service Design’ to applying and practicing with the tools and approaches on real work based challenges.
But what do they end up doing? What does application of this way of working look and feel like?
We hear about four participants who experienced the full programme in this three part blog.
Stephen Read recognised a challenge in his part of the Civil Service and decided he wanted to do something about the New Employee’s experience. He used what he learned on the programme to understand and develop new ways of supporting new recruits. The employee experience from the point of the job offer to the end of their probation.
Starting with discovery
In a more traditional setting, service improvements often start with someone recognising there is a challenge or problem to be solved and then developing a strategy and writing a report to describe how to change things. Often this report focuses on describing the improvements, what they’ll cost and how and when they’ll be implemented. Our desire to fix things means we often feel a need to do something and jump straight to a solution. It gives the illusion of progress. But, how do we know if it’s the right solution? How do we know if it works for the user?
A design thinking approach starts with understanding what the challenge looks and feels like from the perspective of the people who we are trying to reach. The people most likely to use or service or be on the receiving end of our new policy or strategy..
Using the semi structured interview techniques learned on the programme, Stephen carried out 12 in-depth interviews with staff who’d recently joined or left the organisation. He also spoke with people from other government and non-government organisations to understand how they dealt with onboarding new starters.
Defining the findings
He then used tools learnt on the programme: the empathy map canvas and user journey mapping to make sense of what he’d heard.
Different expectations
He discovered that people had very different expectations when it came to their new role. Interestingly, those who’d come from the civil service had far lower expectations than those who came from the private sector or elsewhere.
Different experiences
What was especially powerful was the discovery that staff had wildly different experiences when joining the organisation, depending on geographical location and the team they joined. Understanding which elements help create a better or worse experience for the new starter helped him to develop ideas to create a consistently good experience across the organisation.
A seamless, consistent experience
He discovered that people valued a smooth, seamless on-boarding experience. People also valued feeling part of ‘one organisation’ from the start. For example, they didn’t like discovering that they’d been treated differently because they’d joined a different team.
Left to fend for themselves
Some new starters reported feeling that they’d been left to work things out for themselves. They didn’t always know who to turn to for support. They didn’t want to bother their line managers with seemingly trivial questions.
Radio silence
Once people accepted a job offer, they reported there was often a very long period of “radio silence” until the eventual start date — for some up to 3 months. Some reported feeling scared that the job offer had just been some sort of dream!
So, Stephen did some additional desk research at this point. He pulled together all the communications that went out to a new starter from all the different teams, to see if they told a consistent story and the new starter knew what to expect next.
All of this research and analysis created the foundation for the next stage. Without this discovery work, Stephen admits his ideas would have been less diverse and less grounded in the needs of the user.
Idea generation
The depth and richness of the user research and the insights generated, helped Stephen and his colleagues to facilitate what we call an “ideation” session where they came up with some novel ideas to improve the new employee experience, including:
- begin communications and develop the relationship between the new employee and their line manager even before day one, during the often lengthy period between acceptance of the job offer and start date.
- set up ‘new starter networks’, where new starters could connect in person or remotely with others who are in the same boat.
- create a buddy scheme — someone to connect to from outside of their team to ask those awkward questions you may not want to ask of your line manager.
- welcome kit for new starters, so that they have the things they need, like a map of the building and a mug or glass, but also to make them feel welcome.
- facilitate recent new starters to do the induction sessions, rather than the HR officers who’ve been with the organisation for many years. After all, they’ve recently been through this experience and will be in a better place to share their learning.
- do a new starter interview after a few weeks to make sure things are starting off on the right track for the employee and also to get a fresh perspective on the organisation from the new starter before they become part of the wallpaper.
Prototyping and testing solutions
Before jumping in and just implementing solutions, Stephen tested these ideas by creating small scale, low cost experiments — trying them out on new recruits. Then, looking at what worked or not they decided which ideas to take forward (or not) and how to adapt some of the ideas We call this prototyping.
This is different from piloting. Piloting is about implementing a small scale trial of your nearly fully functional service. Often it’s hard to completely scrap your idea by the time you get to pilot stage. Prototyping on the other hand is a method of trying out your idea in the smallest, cheapest way possible. It’s best used to test your biggest assumptions before you heavily invest resources in it. It’s a way of reducing risk.
There was a spin-off piece of work to look at the employee letters. This involved a multi-disciplinary workshop to look at letters on a small number of specific topics. For these, they did some initial user research to look at expectations, rewrote the letters using the Hemingway App (which helps make your writing bold and clear). They then tested these with the people they’re designing for. Stephen said “we had some really positive feedback”. A collective win as this workshop format has now been used to consider and improve other correspondence sent by the organisation.
Stephen’s journey wasn’t without challenge. As many of these ideas cut across different teams and budgets, it was hard to get agreement across all parties. He frequently heard the “we’ve tried that idea before” argument. Stephen was well prepared for their challenges; he used evidence gathered in the form of quotes and video clips to influence others and help show them how they could improve the experience of new members of staff.
Stephen talks about how the program helped him to think and do things differently. Describing how it gave him a fresh perspective and different mindset. Key learning from the programme was to listen to truly understand people’s experience — this new depth of understanding was the foundation to breakthrough thinking and idea generation. Now he talks about always starting by questioning his assumptions and how he focuses on helping others to question their own hidden assumptions. For him the very act of doing this with others has helped initiate positive change.
‘Service Design in Practice’ is a six month learning and development programme, which takes people with little or no experience of using service design to applying and practicing these tools and approaches on real work based challenges.
Apply to participate in the next programme in January 2021 or contact me to discuss — I don’t bite! jo@weareserviceworks.com.
This is the third in a series of three posts about the exploits of some of our recent programme participants.
If you missed it, read part one: “Applying a service design mindset to help a new housing association tenant app succeed: case study”.
Part two: “Using service design to improve customer satisfaction in a housing association: case study”.
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At Service Works, we help government and third sector employees to design services that work through training, consultancy and workshops.
