There is always something new out there promising to transform the way we work.
Right now, much of that attention is understandably focused on AI. Organisations are exploring copilots, automation, intelligent platforms and new tools that promise to make work faster, smarter and more efficient. Before that, it was collaboration platforms, employee apps, digital workplaces and countless other technologies designed to improve how work gets done.
And many of these tools genuinely can make work better. The problem isn’t the technology itself. It’s what happens when the technology starts determining how work is designed.
Because there is a subtle but important difference between asking, “What can this technology do?” and asking, “What do our people need, and where might technology help?”
Perhaps we need to get better at asking the second question first.
The shiny new tool problem
It’s easy to understand why organisations get excited about new technology. A new system is tangible. It comes with features, demos and promises of measurable improvements. There is usually a compelling story about the time it will save, the processes it will streamline or the insights it will unlock.
But technology also has a habit of becoming the starting point for conversations about work.
A new platform is purchased and teams are asked how they can use it. An AI tool becomes available and suddenly everyone is looking for processes to automate. A new HR system arrives and existing ways of working are redesigned around what the system allows.
Sometimes that creates genuine improvement. But sometimes we end up solving the problems that technology is good at solving, rather than the problems employees actually have.
This is something we see repeatedly when exploring employee experience. The things that make work unnecessarily difficult are often far less exciting than the solutions organisations are being sold.
It might be a process that requires someone to enter the same information three times. A manager who can’t approve something without going through several layers of bureaucracy. Information stored in five different places. A meeting that happens every week because it always has, despite nobody being quite sure what it’s for. An employee who needs to contact three teams to answer what should be a simple question.
None of these problems require particularly futuristic thinking.
But fixing them could have a much greater impact on someone’s experience of work.
Start with the experience, not the solution
Human-centred design gives us a useful way of thinking about this because it starts somewhere very different.
Rather than beginning with a solution and looking for places to apply it, we begin by understanding people. What are they trying to achieve? What gets in their way? Where does work feel unnecessarily difficult? What takes more time or energy than it should? Where are the moments of frustration, confusion or duplication?
Only once we understand the problem do we start exploring what might improve it.
Sometimes the answer will absolutely be technology. AI might remove repetitive administrative work, help someone navigate large amounts of information or make it easier to access the knowledge they need. Automation might eliminate unnecessary handovers. A better platform might make collaboration considerably easier.
But sometimes the answer might be to remove a step from a process. Give someone more autonomy. Rewrite a confusing piece of communication. Clarify who makes a decision. Stop holding that meeting. Make an existing system easier to use.
These solutions might not sound transformative. For the person experiencing the problem every day, they can be.
Efficiency isn’t the same as a better experience
There is another reason this distinction matters.
Technology is often introduced with efficiency as the primary measure of success. How much time can we save? How many tasks can we automate? How much faster can we complete a process?
Those are useful questions, particularly when organisations are under pressure to improve productivity. But efficiency is only one dimension of good work.
A process can become faster while becoming more frustrating. A task can be automated while removing a useful moment of human connection. A self-service system can reduce administrative workload for one team while quietly transferring that workload to everyone else. An AI tool can produce something more quickly while people forget that additional checking, correcting or decision-making is most likely needed further down the line.
This is where designing around technology can lead us astray. We optimise the part of the system that is easiest to measure, without always understanding what has happened to the wider employee experience.
Human-centred design asks us to look at the whole experience instead. Not simply whether the new system works, but whether work works better for the people doing it.
AI makes this more important, not less
AI has accelerated this conversation because its potential applications are so broad. Almost every organisation is now considering where AI might fit into existing roles, processes and employee experiences.
There is enormous opportunity here. But there is also a risk that we become so focused on identifying “AI use cases” that we skip the more fundamental question of what needs improving in the first place.
Imagine starting somewhere else.
Instead of asking teams where they could use AI, we could ask where work currently feels harder than it needs to be. Where are people spending time on low-value activity? Which processes create the most frustration? Where is information difficult to find? Which decisions take too long? What gets in the way of people doing their best work?
Then we can look at the answers and decide what kind of intervention makes sense.
Some of those interventions will involve AI. Some will involve other technology. Some will involve redesigning a process, changing a policy, building capability or simply removing something that no longer serves a useful purpose.
The point is not to be less ambitious about technology. It’s to be more ambitious about work.
Perhaps transformation doesn’t always need to look transformative
There is a tendency for workplace transformation to gravitate towards big things. New systems. New operating models. New programmes. New platforms.
Yet when we speak to employees about their everyday experience, improvement often lives in much smaller moments. Being able to find something when they need it. Understanding what is expected of them. Having the authority to make a sensible decision. Not having to navigate an unnecessarily complicated process. Having technology that supports what they’re trying to do rather than creating another obstacle.
These things aren’t particularly glamorous. They rarely make for an impressive technology demo. But collectively, they shape what work actually feels like.
That is why human-centred design matters so much as technology continues to evolve. It gives us a way to make sure we don’t confuse technological capability with genuine progress.
The opportunity isn’t simply to redesign work around everything our new tools make possible. It’s to understand the work we want to create, the experience people need in order to do it well and the problems genuinely worth solving.
Then we can decide where technology belongs.
At People Lab, we help organisations use human-centred design to understand what really gets in the way of a great employee experience and redesign work around the people experiencing it. Sometimes that leads to bigger changes. Sometimes it uncovers surprisingly simple ones. Either way, the starting point is the same: understand the problem before falling in love with the solution.
