Employee Experience and Design Thinking – building the workforce of the future
Employee Experience and Design Thinking – building the workforce of the future
Is the current skill sets inappropriate for the adaptive, agile changing nature of work and technology?
Is your organisation misfiring? Or worse, backfiring?
Is there evidence of silo mentality and non-collaborative behaviour?
Are staff misaligned with the organisation mission and purpose?
If the answer to any of the above questions is yes, most likely, something should be done about it. Read on, to learn more about influencing factors and potential strategies to build the effective work force of the future.
The world of work is transforming with new technologies and industries changing the landscape and affecting how work is being conducted. The fourth industrial revolution is a reality, now. This affects how managers, from Human Resources to Line Managers, work together in collaborative groups.
Research last year (2018) from the Mckinsey Global Institute, has pointed towards automation and artificial intelligence (AI) as key drivers in changing the nature of work.
5 influencing trends affecting the world of work *:
1. Automation will accelerate the shift in required workforce skills we have seen over the past 15 years
2. Some skill categories will be less in demand. Basic cognitive skills, which include basic data input and processing, will decline by 15 percent, falling to 14 percent of hours worked, from 18 percent.
3. Companies will need to make significant organizational changes at the same time as addressing these skill shifts to stay competitive. There is a new emphasis on continuous learning for workers, and a shift to more cross-functional and team-based work.
4. Competition for high-skill workers will increase, while displacement will be concentrated mainly on low-skill workers
5. Almost half of the companies surveyed say they expect to take the lead in building the workforce of the future, but all stakeholders will need to work together to manage the large-scale retraining and other transition challenges ahead.
*A survey of more than 3,000 business leaders in seven countries conducted by McKinsey in 2018
The McKinsey Global report goes on to mention that a huge shift in Social and Emotional skills, as well as technology skills, will be required. In this area, advanced negotiation skills, interpersonal skills and empathy and entrepreneurship as well as initiative taking are key skills that staff will need to develop and improve.
The question then arises: So what? How might this affect your work place and your current resource planning and staff experience strategies? How to ensure that current staff are appropriately upskilled? How might future recruits be onboarded and current employees upskilled with the appropriate experiences and employee engagement strategies?
Why is employee experience so important?
With the backdrop of Artificial Intelligence eliminating most basic functions and some higher cognitive functions, Employee Experience is one of the differentiators that will influence the war on talent. Employees who have fulfilling work experiences from onboarding through to retirement will likely to lead to more engaged employees and brand advocates. Building an organisation of committed employees aligned with the organisations “reason for being” is a pre-requisite to delighted customers.
Employee experience encapsulates what people encounter, observe or feel over the course of their employee journey at an organization. Designing an improved employee experience involves defining key staff journey elements and identifying the complimentary structures that will support preferred outcomes.
Given that significant time and resources are spent on hiring new staff, and training and developing current staff, it is essential that HR and Line Managers collaborate to ensure preferred staff experience.
Aside from a rich on-boarding experience to help new employees find their feet, learning and developing into new growth opportunities is an essential element of a rich employee experience. This points to the importance of core staff needs beyond rewards and recognition.
Other essential factors to ensure a satisfied staff member is regular engagement and communication to ensure an informed and aligned workforce with its core mission and “reason for being”. Involvement on mission-critical projects that shift and shape the organisation towards relevant and sustainable growth objectives will enhance the overall work experience for engaged employees.
Design Thinking and Employee Experience
Now, as a line manager or an HR manager, what tools and methods might be used to ensure an improved staff experience?
With the dramatic changes taking place in the work place as new disruptive technology is adopted, an amorphous culture arises. Archaic and fragmented physical and organisational structures that are not conducive to modern workplace dynamics compound workforce frustration and inability to be agile and adapt to modern workplace demands. Strategies must therefore be developed to minimize this impact on the workforce and inspire the current talent pool to collaborate on new initiatives.
Enter human-centred design
Design Thinking emerged in the early 2000’s as a way to help companies become more human or customer-centred by co-creating innovative solutions, with customer needs as the focal point. It has been shown that design-oriented companies outperform companies that are not.
Simply put, the Design Thinking framework involves engaging multi-disciplinary teams to come up with new concepts (solutions) for complex ill-defined problems. It is an inter-disciplinary framework that draws on a number of tools and principles that result in the co-creation of novel solutions that work.
Empathy lies at the heart of Design Thinking and by looking at customer or user problems from their point of view, teams are able to define issues and challenges and develop strategies that remove obstacles by prototyping and testing with a pool of stakeholders.
We have already identified that the workplace is affected by disruptive change, whether by internal or external disruptive forces. These disruptive forces include technology, conflicting cultures, rigid structures and emerging competition. These influences are contextual and thus complex to understand. A clear process to building an understanding of the systemic nature of these challenges is a first step in "making sense" of the issues.
By building Design Thinking capability in-house, organisations are finding that it is easier to manage complex problems and develop agility and alignment on organisational mission-relevant development programs. Companies that do this effectivley, both for their customers and for their staff, have been shown to be more adept in the ecosystems in which they operate.
Going back to the McKinsey report: “There is a new emphasis on continuous learning for workers, and a shift to more cross-functional and team-based work”. Practically, how might we ensure this continuous learning and preform the described shift above? How might we design improved Employee Experiences with Design Thinking?
The Design Thinking framework will help teams to not only learn new ways of working but it will also enable teams to discover new and relevant solutions.
A high level Design Thinking approach would entail:
1. Set-up a multi-disciplinary team (s) across silos to focus on researching and discovering staff needs and pain points
2. Map out the current landscape including the technology environment, the physical environment and the cultural environment
3. Research and identify impediments that are preventing a preferred situation for key stakeholders across this landscape
4. Define opportunities that will make a significant impact on staff experience and preferred outcomes
5. Co-create solutions with stakeholders including staff, management and human resources to drive evolution
A typical design thinking process is iterative, involves engaging key stakeholders and after some initial workshops, additional ethnographic research, ideation, prototyping and testing exercises may be necessary to implement a set of evolving solutions.
Conclusion: A complete employee experience would embody setting up solution platforms that focus on improving the work environment and physical space, technology and how it interweaves with the application of cognitive skills while building a culture conducive to a performing workforce.
Factors that affect employee experience include, setting up meaningful work streams, growth opportunity pathways, trust-based leadership, and a dynamic rewarding work environment.
Design Thinking has proved to be an effective framework for building solutions across the customer and the employee experience spectrum while helping align the workforce with “the why” of the organisation – its reason for being.
Remaining relevant to ones customers requires remaining relevant to the workforce. Design Thinking is a useful, if not an essential framework to help build the empathy, understanding and environment necessary to navigate today's technological trends and related cognitive processing capabilities.
This article was written by Robert Bloom, founder and managing partner of DesignThinkers Academy South Africa. Robert is an engaging key note speaker, facilitator and entrepreneur, passionate about sustainable organisation improvement using Design thinking and holistic thinking mechanisms.
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