When the customer is your own employee
A twelve-hour module teaching sixteen people to turn experience design inwards, working a practical case from start to finish.
The challenge
The Escuela de Organización Industrial runs a customer and user experience design course for unemployed people, running several months with eight to ten teachers. Our brief was the module on human resources management and employee experience.
The challenge was the turn we had to make. Anyone arriving at a CX and UX course assumes two things: that designing experiences is about selling more, and that design thinking is about digital products. Here there was no screen to design. The problem was turnover and the engagement of the people already working at the company.
And it had to be done in twelve hours, with a group of sixteen people with no shared background in design, leaving them something they could use the day they found a job.
Approach
We spent little time on the conceptual frame and a lot on the case. Just enough to fix two ideas that change how you look at the problem: that employee experience is designed with people rather than for them, and that a company is not a machine controlled by rules and procedures but a system that learns and adapts.
From there, most of the twelve hours went into a case: a technology company of two hundred and twenty people with 26% annual turnover against 15% for its sector, and an engagement survey at 65 out of 100 where the industry average is 80. Management asks HR to fix it.
The groups walked the full double diamond: they interviewed three different profiles, mapped the current experience, reframed the problem and built the redesigned one.
- Designing with people rather than for them: the distinction that orders everything else
- The full double diamond: empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test
- A toolkit for each phase: stakeholder map, archetypes, personas, qualitative interviews, insight clustering and employee journey map
- Interviews prepared and run with three profiles: team leadership, staff and human resources
- A map of the current experience before proposing anything
- The challenge reframed from what the interviews said, not from what management said
- SCAMPER to generate alternatives and a concept sheet to choose between them
- The redesigned experience built and contrasted against the starting point
Key outcomes
16
people trained, with no shared background in design, working one case from start to finish.
12
hours of module, most of the time spent solving the case rather than listening to theory.
3
profiles interviewed by the groups before proposing anything: those who lead a team, those who are in one, and those who manage people.
2
maps built by each group: the experience as it is today and the experience as it should be.
The most valuable part happened halfway through. The brief they were given was the one HR gets in real life: 'turnover is high, fix it'. The challenge they ended up working on was a different one, much smaller and far more solvable: how to improve the first month of onboarding so that it works and qualified people stop leaving. That jump, from symptom to problem, is what they really took away.
Why this is not a tools course
Design thinking templates can be learnt in an afternoon and are all over the internet. What is hard, and what gets paid for, is framing the problem properly before solving it: telling the symptom management complains about from the cause that can actually be fixed, and finding that cause by asking the people who live the process from the inside. That habit works the same for an employee experience as for a purchasing process or a complaint, and it does not expire with the tool of the month.
Got a process that hurts?
Tell us about it in half an hour. No forty-page deck. If we are not the right people, we will say so and point you towards someone who is.