Most organisations have at least one employee experience challenge they know needs fixing.
Perhaps onboarding has grown organically over the years and no longer feels like one coherent experience. Maybe a process technically works, but employees find it frustrating or confusing. Perhaps you’re trying to rethink learning, performance development or communication, but there are so many different needs and perspectives that it’s difficult to know where to start.
Often, the problem isn’t a lack of ideas. It’s finding a way to get underneath the challenge, understand what people really need and turn all that insight into something practical enough to test.
That’s exactly what an EX Design Sprint is designed to do.
Why EX problems can be surprisingly difficult to solve
Employee experience challenges rarely sit neatly within one team or process.
Take onboarding. What a new joiner experiences might be shaped by recruitment, HR, IT, learning, their line manager, internal communication and the systems they need to navigate. Each part might work perfectly well in isolation, while the overall experience still feels fragmented.
The same is true of learning, performance, hybrid working, employee voice and many of the other experiences organisations are trying to improve. Our instinct can be to jump quickly to solutions. We redesign the induction programme. Introduce another communication. Change the platform. Create a toolkit. Add another manager intervention.
But before asking what should we do?, there are usually some more important questions to answer. What is the experience actually like today? Where are the moments that matter? What do employees need from the experience? What assumptions are we making? And what problem are we really trying to solve?
Human-centred design gives us a structured way to answer those questions before we start designing the answer.
So, what actually happens in an EX Design Sprint?
An EX Design Sprint brings the right people together around a real organisational challenge and takes them through a focused design process.
Rather than spending the day talking about employee experience in theory, you’re actively working on something that matters to your organisation.
First, we explore the experience as it exists today. That might involve existing employee insight, journey mapping, identifying moments that matter and exploring what’s already working as well as where the friction sits.
Then we move into the opportunity space. This is where we deliberately step into the shoes of the people we’re designing for, exploring the human needs behind the challenge and reframing what we’ve learnt into focused design questions.
Only then do we move into solutions. The group generates possibilities, develops the strongest ideas and starts turning them into concepts or prototypes that can be tested and improved.
It means that, rather than leaving with another flipchart full of ideas, teams typically leave with a clearer definition of the problem, tangible concepts to take forward, early prototypes or solution directions and a roadmap for what happens next.
Just as importantly, they’ve learnt a repeatable way of approaching EX problems in the future.
What could you use a design sprint for?
Almost any employee experience where there’s a genuine problem to solve can lend itself to this approach!
You could rethink onboarding. When KPMG wanted to improve the experience of overseas new joiners, the starting point wasn’t to redesign the onboarding programme behind closed doors. More than 30 recent overseas joiners were involved alongside stakeholders from HR, Audit Operations and Learning & Development.
Their insight helped the team identify the moments that mattered, understand the human needs behind them and generate and prototype potential solutions. The work ultimately contributed to a new 12-week introduction to the business, new communities and a more formal buddy system, as well as a new pre-boarding support role.
It shifted the conversation from delivering an onboarding programme to designing an onboarding experience.
You could tackle a fragmented end-to-end journey. ScotRail also used EX design to rethink onboarding, bringing together recent employees, managers and people involved at different points in the process.
One of the unexpected benefits was simply seeing the whole experience together. As Sodi Kakouris, Digital Learning Manager at ScotRail, explained:
“One of the most valuable things we learnt from this process, was how each area of the business interacted with the onboarding process. It helped us to understand what was needed and improve how we do things. Just as importantly, going through the process broke down the silo effect that we had fallen into.”
The ideas generated went on to inform a new onboarding system designed to improve communication with new starters, streamline recruitment and equipment processes and help people arrive ready for day one.
Or you could redesign an experience that isn’t traditionally thought of as EX at all. Kroll used a human-centred design approach to rethink technical learning.
Rather than beginning with learning content or platforms, the work started by understanding what employees actually needed. Insight workshops, interviews and empathy mapping fed into learning personas, which were then used to co-create future learning journeys and prototypes.
The result wasn’t simply a set of recommendations. It helped shift the team’s mindset from delivering training to designing learning experiences, while giving them tools they could continue using themselves.
As Kroll put it:
“Working with People Lab helped us uncover the reality of our learners’ experience – and equipped us with the strategy, tools and confidence to change it.”
And that’s really the point. A design sprint doesn’t have to be about onboarding. It could focus on performance development, internal communication, career development, recognition, employee listening, a particular moment in the employee journey or almost any experience where you know something could work better.
And as an added bonus, the other output is capability
This is perhaps the part of EX Design Sprints we find most exciting.
Yes, you’re there to solve a problem. But you’re also learning a different way to solve problems.
Because the team works through the process themselves, they experience tools such as journey mapping, empathy mapping, ideation and prototyping in context. They’re not learning human-centred design as an abstract methodology. They’re using it to make progress on something they actually care about.
That makes it much easier to take those approaches back into everyday work. We’ve seen this in practice and it’s why we don’t really think of an EX Design Sprint as either consultancy or training. It’s both.
And where does AI fit?
There’s another reason we think this way of working matters now.
AI is making it possible to do parts of the design process much faster. It can help us synthesise employee insight, generate initial prompts and possibilities, and analyse feedback from testing. Used well, that’s incredibly useful.
But faster idea generation doesn’t remove the need to understand the people we’re designing for. If anything, it makes that capability more important. AI can give us 50 possible answers in seconds. Human-centred design helps us work out whether we’re answering the right question in the first place.
That’s why our current EX Design Sprints also explore practical ways to use AI as a thinking partner throughout the design process, while keeping human insight, empathy, creativity and judgement firmly at the centre.
Have you got an EX challenge we could help you crack?
You don’t need to arrive with a perfectly defined problem. In fact, working out what the real challenge is can be an important part of the process.
You might know that new joiners aren’t getting the experience you want them to have. That a process creates too much friction. That employees aren’t engaging with something you’ve invested heavily in. Or simply that an important part of the employee journey could be much better than it is today.
An EX Design Sprint gives you the space and structure to explore that challenge properly, involve the people who matter and turn insight into ideas you can actually do something with.
And, rather than relying on someone else to keep solving EX problems for you, your team builds the tools and confidence to tackle the next one too.
If you’ve got an employee experience challenge you’d like to explore, get in touch with People Lab. We’d love to hear what’s getting in the way and talk about whether an EX Design Sprint could help you move it forward.
