Today, we hosted a webinar with our friends from 5ive.Studio: an Experience Design agency based in the Nordics.
In this session, co-founders Steve Usher and Morten Raahague looked at:
- What employee experience design actually means
- Why businesses need to champion human-centered design
- How HR can redesign experiences to impact the bottom line
Here’s a summary of Steve and Morten’s five steps to help HR design incredible employee experiences:
1. Start by shifting your mindset
When it comes to designing a great experience: it’s less about budget and more about shifting your perspective.
Think of a kaleidoscope. All it needs is one small tweak and the formation changes. Design thinking is all about re-imagining the perspective from the lens of human experience.
Stuck for inspiration on how to shift lenses? Steve and Morten recommended looking outside of HR. Think about other kinds of experiences all of us will have encountered. It could be anything, from dining in a restaurant to using public transport. Then reflect on what key moments make them memorable, from start to finish.
2. Understand your people
Like all design thinking, employee experience design starts with knowing your people. In HR, this means transitioning from process-oriented and target-driven to a human-centered experience.
And thanks to modern HR tech, it’s easy to capture real-time data so you know how your people are feeling. These days technology is the enabler of experience. And in the workplace, using tech and data is a surefire way to generate business value and get people listening.
3. Get buy-in from stakeholders
This brings us nicely onto the next point! To get sign off to redesign an employee experience, align the initiative to current KPIs or metrics.
For example, if attrition is the issue, use people data to identify the points in the experience that could be influencing high turnover. Perhaps it’s a moment in the onboarding flow, like an employee’s first day.
4. Grab a pen and paper
Once you have your buy-in, start by jotting down all the points that make up what’s required of the employee’s first day, from beginning to end. How do you currently go about it, and what’s the intention of it?
Then write down what you think makes a great first-day experience. What makes it memorable and personal? How do key moments, like a handshake or receiving some branded goodies on the desk interact with all five of the senses?
5. Look at the bigger picture
Finally, combine your points of what makes a great experience, put them into chronological so they make a journey from start to finish. Steve and Morten recommended utilizing your own brand and products here, as this will make it even more personalized and tailored to that person’s journey.
And voila! You have designed your strategy to redesign that moment in the employee experience.
A huge thanks to the wonderful Steve and Morten. Not only are they truly “people people” who have great energy and passion for the subject…they provided such an educative session, which can help us all move from buzzword to action.
Click to learn how 5ive.Studio can transfer valuable design skills with a “learning by doing approach” in your organization, and propel your employee experiences to the next level.