Leveraging the Power of Design Sprints for People
HR functions are supposed to be close to employees, knowing and caring deeply about their customer’s needs. Yet, more often than not, it is blamed to be more loyal to policies and processes than the people it’s supposed to represent. Thankfully, Design is changing that all over the globe in all companies where design is getting embedded in the way of work. Telenor has also taken design and leveraged it for improving its products and services, and not the least in the HR function. Experimenting with new frameworks and methodologies is part of the culture here, and so we recently experimented with the Design Sprint process and used it for coming up with better solutions, faster.
What is Design Sprint?
Originating from Google but replicated in all types of industries since, Design Sprint is a structured framework for solving problems: it takes your problem and converts it into a tangible solution in the form of a working prototype, ready to test with real customers. But what makes a design sprint stand out is that all of this is done in just 4 days or less, by a team of around 5–7 people who work dedicatedly on the problem. More importantly, it’s one of the key methodologies within RED — the transformative new way of work being cultivated in Telenor to make it a future proof organisation leveraging the power of design, lean, agile methodology and innovation.
While the original design sprint is a 5-day process, it can be tweaked to suit your needs and problem. The most effective and popular is the 4-day version which allows for sufficient time to understand the problem and come up with a solution, while also challenging the team to work efficiently. Recently, we ran two different design sprints on two different problems in Group HR.
Improving Employee Experience on Mobility
Mobility is a key differentiator for Telenor which allows the organisation to leverage its global reach and help develop both people and societies through talent exchange.
Improving the mobility user experience was the challenge of the design sprint that included employees from Mobility, Group Talent Management and Group HRBP teams.
On Day 1 we interviewed people who are on mobility assignments to understand their issues — we learnt about the stress of relocating families, pressure of adapting to new cultures, difficulty of staying connected back home and the anxiety of finding a new role after returning. Connecting deeply with the customers helped us pick a problem worth solving during the sprint: the repatriation process.
We set our long-term goal to “make repatriating expats feel taken care of” — this goal set the direction for us as we explored solutions on Day 2. We started by looking around for inspiration, both inside and outside Telenor before getting down to make our own solution. Design Sprint ensures everyone contributes — this is done through activities such as Crazy 8 which are individual and set the stage for group discussions. At the end of the day, we had six great solutions, helping us come up with the solution to our problem by mixing the best parts of each.
On Day 3 we converted our rough solution into a minimum viable prototype (MVP), so it could be showed to customers. And finally, on Day 4 we shared the prototype with six customers to get their feedback to help us validate our solution and refine it further. “This is more than what I could ask for”, “huge improvement over what we have right now” are just some of the responses we received, which is impressive given how much time we had to work on it.
And this points to the biggest advantage of a design sprint: with no long meetings or distractions, it lets you make many weeks’ progress in just a few days. While it may seem like a huge commitment to dedicate 4 days to a sprint, the business case for doing it becomes self-evident once you see the huge progress a sprint lets you achieve.
Up skilling the organisation on Agile Way of Work
What’s the best way to figure out how to up skill an organisation towards a more agile way of work? By being agile yourself! So the Global Learning & Development team ran a design sprint inspired workshop on how to develop Telenor into an agile organisation in 2019.
Starting with collecting and synthesising all the insights collected so far on the problem from inside Telenor and the case studies outside, we were able to find out the most important jobs to be done. We then developed the first prototype of our agile portfolio and its top-level themes, before showing them to three SVPs and getting their feedback.
The outcome? An entire portfolio of three different solutions with feedback from top leaders including: an introductory online crash course for all employees, agile leadership training for top teams and workshops for middle managers — all of this under 6 hours, again pointing to the advantage of this way of working.
Sprint towards the future!
Design sprints can help you achieve great progress if applied properly and to the right problem. I see the benefits of working this way whenever I facilitate a design sprint and strongly believe it should be tried by more teams. And as the need to come up with better and faster solutions gets more urgent in the coming years, design sprints are going to become more and more valuable.
