The strategy has been signed off, the senior team is aligned, the slides look good. and the town hall has happened. Everyone agrees with the ambition.
We’re going to become more people-first. More agile. More innovative. More joined-up. We’ll create a brilliant employee experience, transform internal communication or build a culture in which people can do their best work.
But then Tuesday morning arrives?
- Someone needs to redesign the onboarding experience.
- A leader wants a communication plan by Friday.
- Engagement scores have fallen, and the team needs to decide what to do about it.
- A new organisational change is already moving at speed.
There are meetings to attend, deadlines to hit and stakeholders asking for answers. So what does the strategy actually ask us to do differently? This is where even good strategies can come unstuck.
The gap between intention and action
Most organisations don’t lack ambition and they don’t necessarily lack expertise either. What they often lack is a practical way of turning what they believe into how work gets done.
A set of values doesn’t automatically change the way a project is designed.
An employee experience strategy doesn’t tell someone what to do when different groups of employees need very different things.
A channel strategy doesn’t necessarily stop the urgent request for an all-staff email.
A commitment to listening doesn’t guarantee that employee insight will influence a decision that has almost already been made.
And telling people to be more “people-first” doesn’t help much when they’re sitting in front of a blank document wondering where to begin.
This is the gap People Lab has always worked in: the space between the big ambition and a regular Tuesday morning.
Methodology matters
Methodology can sound rather grand. But, at its simplest, it means having a reliable way to approach a problem. It gives people somewhere to start and helps them resist the pressure to jump straight to the most obvious answer. It creates a shared way of thinking and working, particularly when the challenge is messy and there isn’t one objectively correct solution.
Over the years, we’ve developed and tested a practical, people-first approach through hundreds of projects across employee experience, internal communication, culture and change.
Although the tools might vary, the principles are consistent:
- Understand people before jumping to answers.
- Use evidence rather than assumption.
- Take time to frame the real problem.
- Design with people, rather than simply for them.
- Use psychology and behavioural science to understand what might help or hinder change.
- Explore different possibilities before settling on a solution.
- Prototype and test ideas before investing heavily in them.
- Learn, adapt and improve as you go.
None of these ideas is especially controversial and most people agree with them. The challenge is applying them consistently when real work, organisational politics and competing priorities get involved.
What might happen differently on a regular Tuesday morning?
Imagine the organisation wants to improve onboarding. The familiar response might be to set up a working group and start listing everything that needs to be added to the induction programme.
Someone suggests a new welcome pack. Someone else wants a video from the CEO. Another person remembers that the intranet pages need updating.
Everyone is being productive and things are happening.
But nobody has yet established what it is actually like to join the organisation, where the experience breaks down, whether different employees need different things or which problems matter most.
A more people-first process starts somewhere else.
It asks:
- Who are we designing for?
- What are they currently experiencing?
- What evidence do we already have?
- Whose voice is missing?
- What are people trying to do, think or feel at different points?
- Where are the moments that matter?
- What problem are we really trying to solve?
Only then do we start exploring what might make the experience better.
The result may still include a welcome pack, a video or new intranet content. But those things are now responses to an understood need, rather than activities looking for a purpose.
That is what methodology changes. Not just the final answer, but the route we take to reach it.
Tools are useful. Knowing when and how to use them is more useful.
There is no shortage of employee experience and communication tools.
Personas. Journey maps. Empathy maps. Channel frameworks. Listening data. Behavioural models. Design sprints. Measurement frameworks.
They can all be extremely valuable. They can also become attractive templates that are completed during a workshop, admired for a while and then filed away.
- A persona only creates value if it shapes a real decision.
- A channel strategy only matters if it influences the communication plan being built on Tuesday morning.
- An employee journey map needs to help someone notice a problem, understand why it matters and decide what to change.
The methodology provides the connective tissue. It helps people work out which tool to use, when to use it, what to do with the output and where they need to pause, challenge an assumption or involve someone else.
That’s how strategies and frameworks become part of the work, rather than additional documents sitting beside it.
Working on the work
This is why we increasingly build capability through live work rather than separating “learning” from “doing”.
Instead of teaching people a methodology in theory and hoping they apply it later, we work alongside them on a genuine organisational challenge.
Together, we:
- understand the brief and interrogate what sits behind it;
- examine the evidence and identify what is missing;
- frame the problem from the perspective of the people experiencing it;
- choose and apply the right tools;
- generate and evaluate possibilities;
- prototype and test ideas;
- decide what to take forward;
- capture what we have learned.
The organisation makes progress on something that matters. At the same time, its people develop the confidence and capability to approach the next challenge differently.
That combination is important.
But how do we help the methodology stick?
This is the question we’ve been exploring at People Lab.
Even when people have experienced a different way of working, the pressures of organisational life can pull them back towards familiar habits.
- Jump to the solution.
- Reuse last year’s plan.
- Ask the same people.
- Send the email.
- Launch the initiative.
And all those carefully developed strategies, personas, frameworks and tools? Too often, they gradually become documents people know exist but rarely use.
What if we could make it easier for people to apply the methodology in the moment they actually need it?
To bring the strategy into the work. To use the evidence already available. To ask better questions before rushing towards an answer. To keep people-first principles alive in everyday decisions, rather than relying on someone remembering a workshop they attended six months ago.
That’s something we’re currently experimenting with at People Lab, including exploring how AI might help us make our tried-and-tested methodology more accessible, practical and embedded in the flow of work.
Not to replace human expertise, empathy or judgement. But to help people use them where they matter most.
We’re testing some ideas now.
More on that soon.
Because strategy only matters when it changes the work
A good strategy creates direction, but direction alone isn’t enough. People also need practical ways of working that help them translate ambition into everyday choices, conversations and decisions.
That is the real test.
Not whether everyone agreed with the strategy when it was presented. Or whether the framework looks impressive. And not whether the methodology made sense during the workshop.
But whether it changes what someone actually does on Tuesday morning.
if you’re interested in finding out more, drop us a line, we’d love to hear from you.
