We love using Design Thinking in our work. In fact we love it so much we* wrote a whole book about how to use it to design amazing experiences that deliver engagement (*with our good friend Belinda Gannaway). If you’re not sure what Design Thinking is, here’s a great quote from Tim Brown, who is the executive chair of IDEO:
“Design thinking is a human centred approach to innovation”
Design Thinking, as a way of approaching employee experience first got a mention in Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends back in 2015. And Design Thinking is super useful for employee experience, because it sets out not only a series of steps, but also a mindset too. This is something we go into in much more detail in our book ‘Employee Experience by Design‘.
But despite being huge advocates for using Design Thinking, it is not the only answer. It’s just one of many tools we need to deploy when designing and activating experiences. And the skill is to know which approach to use, and when.
We’ve recently been researching the skills and capabilities required to design experiences that deliver engagement. And they are many and varied! We heard that Design Thinking is really useful to identify moments that matter and broken moments, and then work towards solutions. You have an issue with on-boarding? Design Thinking can help you to work through possible, human-centred solutions.
But we also heard that employee experience and engagement practitioners need to be researchers, data scientists, psychologists, business experts, project managers, stakeholder influencers, brilliant communicators, strategists, ops experts and a whole lot more. What’s required to positively impact employee experience and engagement has the potential to be incredibly broad. Which means it’s nigh on impossible for one person, or even team, to have everything in their toolbox they’re going to need.
This is why an early conclusion might be that employee experience and engagement practitioners are going need emotional intelligence first and foremost. Why? Because high EQ means good self-awareness; knowing your strengths as well as being comfortable to say “I’m not the best person for that job”.
High EQ also goes means good levels of resilience, which are going to be critical when navigating the politics of delivering on experiences which you don’t have direct ownership of. And of course high EQ means more empathy which is a core skill for EX and engagement.
The results of our research are still coming in – and a big thank you to everyone that has contribute so far. We’re really looking forward to sharing the findings with you early next year. And of you like to be among the first to hear all about the skills and capabilities needed for EX and engagement use this link to register your interest.
