Transforming Employee Engagement
Reimagining the end-to-end Employee lifecycle in a large Multinational consultancy through service design
Domain & Scope
Human Resources, Organisational services
Employee Lifecycle from hiring to retiring
Core Team
Four Members from Design Research Team - Team Lead, Design Manager, Two Design Researchers
Select activities carried out in collaboration with: Psychologists from Behaviour Science Team and Developers & Product Manager from Enterprise Platform Team
Artefacts Designed
User Research: Online Surveys based on Likert Scale, Observation Protocol, Discussion Guide, Worksheets - Journey Probes, Analysis Reports
Ideation : Ideation Method Guides, Evaluation Matrices
Synthesis & Conceptualisation: Persona , Journey Maps, Service Blueprints
Summary
The Human Resources vertical of a large multinational consultancy in the IT sector partnered with the Service Design Research team. The goal was to transform the employee lifecycle engaging employees end-to-end from their hiring to retiring. The project entailed several activities :
-
The onboarding programme was audited as an organisational service offered to new hires. Suitable design recommendations were made to enhance the experience of new employees.
-
The needs, gains and pains of employees & key leadership in their workflows were identified and visualised for collective understanding and improvisation.
-
Interventions to organisational services were proposed to foster a culture of engaged, motivated and happy employees.
Discover
Employees & their contexts
Define
Target segment & Project focus
Develop
Creative design solutions
Deliver
Solution operationalisation
Onboarding Experience Evaluation
Multimodal service design audit of the new hire onboarding programme to identify gaps & oppurtunties
.png)
Problem Statements & Scope
Design Brief was defined collaboratively with Behaviour Science & Enterprise Platform teams
​
.png)
Ideating Service interventions
Opportunities were framed as How-Might We statements, and creatively deliberated upon through ideation methods
Design Recommendations
Interventions addressing pains and service opportunities were incorporated into onboarding experience workflows
​
Discovering Employee Needs
Identified themes in employee experience and workplace zeitgeist via journey probe worksheets
​
Creating Persona on an Employee
An employee character representing the demographic segment decided as the project focus
Conceptualising the Future
Ideas were elaborated into service concepts outlining roles of different stakeholders via the journey maps
​
.png)
Reimagining Employee Engagement
Journeys maps of service concepts were presented to management & leadership for implementation
Mapping the Employee Ecosystem
Service blueprints of organisational workflows, identifying stakeholders and their challenges
Outlining the Current State
A journey map was created for the persona, depicting the sequential actions from their hiring to retiring
​
The contents have been abstracted in accordance to NDA norms. Focus is kept on the process and role.
Discover
Understanding employees, key stakeholders, their interactions and contexts
Onboarding Experience Evaluation
via surveys, observations & interviews
Understanding employee needs
via user research workshop centred on journey probes
Mapping the ecosystem
through stakeholder interviews & service blueprints of key functions
Triangulating Findings
from primary & secondary sources to derive insights
The organisation had envisioned an onboarding programme for new hires. This entailed a series of events to initiate them into the organisational fold, over a span of two months. The onboarding programme was audited as an organisational service offered to the new hires.
A multimodal evaluation approach involving weekly surveys, on-ground observations and interviews was carried out. Thereafter, a comprehensive report was designed outlining :
.png)
Experiential Ratings over time
.png)
Impact of Service scapes
Potential Course corrections
User research activities were carried out with employees and key leadership in the Human Resources workflows. The needs, fears and aspirations of employees were uncovered through worksheet-styled journey probes. Leaders of various Human Resource functions were interviewed to elicit the progression of tasks, stakeholder involved and their challenges. Stakeholder maps and service blueprints of organisational functions were designed. Relevant research literature on forecasted workplace trends and employee engagement was studied, and triangulated with findings gathered from user research.
Define
Synthesizing insights to scope project directions and the demographic segment of employees
Cross-Functional workshops
with service design, behaviour science & enterprise platform teams
Problem Statements & Scope
articulating roles, goals & priorities of collaborating teams
Creating an Employee persona
representative of the target demographic segment
Mapping the current journey
of organisational engagement and learning for the employee persona
Insights synthesised from multiple sources were presented & discussed with behaviour science & enterprise platform teams. Workshops were conducted to align goals, ascertain priorities and define the design brief.
An employee engagement framework was created. Based on organisational vision, a target demographic segment was identified.
A persona of an employee in the target demographic segment was collaboratively designed. A sequential journey for the full employee lifecycle was mapped, with each phase outlining :
Thoughts & Needs
.png)
Feelings
.png)
Pain Points
Touchpoints Encountered
Develop
Conceptualising interventions and service offerings for through collaborative ideation and future-state journey maps
Ideation Sessions
organised within service design team, using different ideation approaches
Clustering of ideas
through criteria-based sorting and affinity mapping
Conceptualising interventions
detailing roles & benefits of involved stakeholders
Mapping a future journey
of organisation engagement & learning for the employee persona
Creative solutions for the employee persona were conceptualised through different ideation approaches. Opportunities identified in previous phases were translated into How Might We ideation statements, such as :
How might we foster a spirit of workplace connection?
How might we adapt learning to the changing AI landscape?
Gathered ideas were clustered and elaborated into service interventions and new organisational offerings.
A future-state journey map of the persona experiencing proposed service concepts was designed. Roles of different stakeholders and their interactions with the employee persona across multiple phases of the journey were outlined.
Deliver
Recommending changes in onboarding experiences and proposing service concepts for operationalisation
Design Recommendations
from multimodal service design audit of onboarding experiences
Interventions operationalised
into onboarding workflows by Human Resources teams
Employee Engagement Concepts
presented to Human Resources Management & Leadership
The service design audit recommended changes and design interventions in the onboarding programme. Human resources teams operationalised these interventions for the ongoing and upcoming onboarding workflows. Interventions were articulated along :
.png)
Emotional gains for Employees
Benefits for Organisation
Ease of Implementation
Service concepts pertaining to different employee engagement phases were presented to Human Resources management & C-suite leadership for implementation across organisation units.
Feedback was sought for the designed service concepts. Design workflows and service concepts were improvised accordingly.
Tasks
Outcomes
I was part of four-member design team involved in the project. Throughout its course, I undertook several tasks and undertook multiple responsibilities :
-
Designing Experience Surveys and evaluating responses with statistical tests.
-
Conducting observations of organisational proceedings to identify implementational strengths, gaps and opportunities.
-
Synthesising findings from multiple primary research sources to design comprehensive audit reports.
-
Facilitating user research workshops with employees through journey probe worksheets. Recruited users through purposive sampling and designed worksheets & supporting artefacts.
-
Notetaking during interviews of key leadership, and cross-functional workshops.
-
Interfacing between different teams for administrative tasks, artefact creation and other design functions.
-
Organising ideation sessions, workshops and meetings with internal as well as external teams.
-
Detailing creative concepts as narrative artefacts for presentation to key stakeholders.
The project is an ongoing effort. Feedback and implementation of several design interventions is underway. The outcomes of the work so far are as follows:
-
Service design audit reports : Presented to C-Suite management & key leadership. The reports received positive recognition and appreciation.
-
Influenced Organisation Talent Strategy : Actionable insights from service design audit reports incorporated into organisation strategy and onboarding programmes.
-
Management Excellence awards : Best practices from onboarding programme submitted as an entry
-
Intellectual Property Contributions : Research papers outlining service design learnings published at international conferences.
-
Special Initiative Award : Individual contributions were recognised and rewarded by C-suite Management
-
Organisational transformation : Select concepts to be rolled out by the organisation, to enhance the organisational experience for employees
Curated Work
​Investigating how users are adopting and sustaining a relationship with their smartwatch