The COVID-19 pandemic changed many things for organizations and their employees. The pandemic has fast-forwarded the arrival of a new era of work. Our needs, expectations and attitudes towards work and our employer have changed. Much traditional HR activity is about delivering functional solutions, often for yesterday’s problems.
But now, more than ever we need to design for the opportunities of today and tomorrow. The EX-Leaders Employee Experience 2020 Global Report suggests focusing on EX is now a feature of most Global Fortune 500 organizations (as well as a significant number of smaller ones). But we also know that many practitioners are unsure where to start to develop their employee experience. The EX-Leaders Employee Experience Global Report suggests that what separates leaders from the rest of the pack is design thinking capability, and we believe this will continue to be the case. In our recent book, ‘EX by design’, Belinda and I set out what we believe are the three key principles of EX design, which is a great place to start when considering how to build your EX-capability and design experiences which make a positive difference to your people.
When learning about design thinking, it’s easy to focus on a set of tools and activities. However, design thinking is much more than an innovation recipe with steps and ingredients. Design thinking is also a mindset with curiosity, empathy and experimentation at its core. EX design borrows these three principles – principles that are inherently optimistic, rooted in a belief that it is possible to understand human experience and to design solutions to improve it. This is why in our book we make the case to bring together tools and approaches from both the world of design think and positive psychology. In summary:
- Curiosity: Being insatiably curious about people and what makes them tick as well as what is possible
- Empathy: Putting people and their experience at the heart of the process
- Experimentation: Constantly learning and iterating – testing multiple small solutions or prototypes to better understand what might solve a problem or realize an opportunity
Let’s look at the three principles in more detail:
EX design and curiosity
Curiosity is fundamental to great design because it challenges assumptions and raises questions. It encourages deep and expansive thinking that helps generate more creative solutions. Writing in Harvard Business Review about her research into curiosity, Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino says that when we are curious, we are less susceptible to confirmation bias – looking for information that supports our beliefs and ignoring evidence suggesting we are wrong. We are also less likely to slip into stereotypes and so make fewer broad judgments about individuals and groups (2018).
Curiosity is powerful for another reason as well. When we ask lots of questions, we become more comfortable acknowledging we don’t have all the answers. This is important as, particularly in HR, people are rewarded for their expertise and it takes a mental shift to look for answers, rather than simply provide them. Curiosity also prompts us to find and work with the people who have the insight or skills we lack. The best designers know that it takes people from all backgrounds and experiences to truly understand a problem and find a solution. Only a fraction of the employee experience is made up of HR products and services, and HR should only be one part of the design team. Great EX design requires new connections, partnerships and conversations across the organization.
EX design and empathy
Human-centered design is rooted in empathy for the people you’re designing for – the ability to stand in someone else’s shoes and see the world through their eyes. Empathy is the route to finding the right answers to our questions. It challenges our preconceived ideas and forces us to set aside our sense of what we think is true, in order to discover what’s really happening for someone else.
Empathy is all about human connection, how we connect with other people in order to travel into and explore their internal world. Doing so means we can spot and seek to solve previously unseen problems and realize new opportunities. If we don’t go deep when it comes to EX design, we get stuck at the level of beer Fridays and football tables. These office perks are nice to have, but they don’t touch the sides when it comes to creating and sustaining emotionally enriching human experiences. Empathy doesn’t just require us to stay close to the people we’re designing for, it requires us to design with our people. This is radical participation in action and for many organizations, it is a paradigm shift in how solutions are specified and developed.
EX design and experimentation
It’s easy to think of experimentation as an action and not a mindset at all. But experimentation all starts in the head – with a commitment to trying things out in order to learn. When we try new things we are literally re-wiring our brain by creating new neural pathways. Conversely our old habits and regular ways of doing things, have really strong, well-worn neural pathways, which is why these things come easy and why we often fall back on them. In everyday life this can be useful. But if we want innovation, or new, or different ideas, we have to be intentional about experimentation. Adopting an experimentation mindset forces us to do this and try new things rather than fall back on our old habits or ways of doing things.
An experimentation mindset is playful. It’s what children instinctively do to learn. But too often we lose our experimental drive. However, the most design-orientated of businesses have a playful experimental approach not just to problem solving, but at the core of the culture. LEGO, for example, shuts down the business one a day year to focus solely on its values of play and help turn more of its people into play ambassadors in their communities.
An experimentation mindset in EX design steers us away from solutions that are over specified, take years to develop and then fail to land. Instead it encourages a bias for action, for continuous experimentation and rapid learning. Great EX solutions are always in beta because they’re always being built on and improved. EX design is by its nature evolutionary, and an experimentation mindset helps drive it forward.
The EX by design framework we outline in our book will enable you to understand the complexity of the system in which EX occurs, but at the same time provide you with easy ways to get started. If you’d like to learn more we can offer you a 20% discount on our book when you buy directly through our Kogan Page here, using the discount code AHR20. Or if you’d like to get hands on we are running a number of EX by Design courses throughout 2022, keep an eye out for dates coming soon.
