It’s a conversation I hear quite often when talking to people working in employee experience.
They’ve invested the time in understanding the experience of work. Insight has been gathered – maybe a survey has been run, or focus groups held. And sometimes teams have gone further – mapping journeys, creating personas, or pulling together detailed reports about what employees are experiencing.
And yet, a few months later, the same question comes up:
“Why hasn’t anything really changed?”
It’s rarely because the thinking is wrong. More often, it’s because the insight hasn’t quite translated into action.
When insight becomes an endpoint
In too many organisations, insight becomes the final output rather than the starting point.
A survey is run –> Results are shared –> A report is produced.
And in some cases, the organisation moves on to the next priority.
Sometimes the cycle repeats the following year.
That’s not because people don’t care about improving the experience of work. Most of the teams I meet care deeply. But insight on its own doesn’t change experiences.
Insight needs to be interpreted, explored and translated into ideas that can be tested and refined and that requires a slightly different capability.
When great work sits in a drawer
I remember working with one organisation where the team had developed a really thoughtful set of employee personas. They had invested time in understanding different employee groups and the challenges they faced in their day-to-day experience of work. The personas were beautifully put together. Clear, insightful and genuinely useful.
But when they came back to us a year later to see why one of their initiatives wasn’t landing, we asked how they’d used the personas in the experience design – and there was a slightly awkward pause.
And that’s not unusual.
Personas, journey maps and insight reports can easily become artefacts – things we create to explain the experience rather than tools we actively use to design better ones.
The shift from artefact to influence
The real power of tools like personas comes when they start influencing everyday decisions.
For example:
- When someone designing a communication campaign asks, “How would this land for this group of employees?”
- When a team planning a process change stops to consider the moments of friction in the journey.
- When leaders begin asking different questions about how work is experienced.
That’s when the work starts to land. Not because the artefacts exist, but because they’re shaping how people think.
Why embedding is the hardest part
This is where many organisations get stuck. It requires space to explore the problem more deeply, generate ideas and test different possibilities before committing to a single solution.
And that’s where many teams find themselves caught between insight and action. They know what the issues are – they just aren’t always sure how to move forward.
Turning insight into action
One of the ways we help teams bridge that gap is through our EX design sprints.
A sprint creates a focused environment where teams can take the insight they already have and use it as the starting point for designing solutions.
Instead of debating ideas endlessly or jumping straight to one solution, the team works through a structured process to explore possibilities, stepping into the shoes of the people they’re designing for with their personas to generate ideas, prototype their concepts and test thinking.
And something interesting happens when teams experience this process for themselves. The insight that previously sat in a report or slide deck suddenly becomes something far more practical. Personas start shaping decisions. Journey maps help teams spot friction points. Ideas are explored, tested and refined rather than assumed.
In other words, the work starts to move from artefact to influence.
Building capability through doing
Knowing what tools like personas or journey maps are for is one thing. Knowing how to use them to design better experiences is something else entirely.
That’s why our EX Design Sprint capability builds focus not just on solving a challenge, but on helping teams learn how to apply human-centred design in practice.
Rather than simply introducing a framework, we work alongside teams as they move through the process together, exploring insight, generating ideas, testing concepts and learning how to turn understanding into action.
And by the end of the sprint, teams haven’t just talked about experience design. They’ve done it. And that’s often the moment when things begin to shift.
The insight is no longer something that sits in a report. It becomes something the organisation actively uses to shape better experiences. And this framework is something teams can reuse, helping them tackle future employee experience or people-first challenges with the same structured, human-centred approach.
We’re running a short webinar next month where we’ll walk through how EX design sprints work in practice and how organisations are using them to move from insight to action. Join us 👉 https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/what-is-an-ex-design-sprint-a-practical-way-to-solve-ex-challenges-tickets-1985142796543?aff=oddtdtcreator
If you’re looking for ways to turn your insight into meaningful experience improvements, it would be great to see you there.
