To excel as the architects of workplace culture and the designers of the employee experience, HR practitioners need to design HR strategies that resonate with their workforce. This often requires a creative approach, such as applying design thinking to their initiatives, says Lisa Burquest, Chief People Officer at Virgin Australia.

“In a world where you’ve got finite resources, you’ve got to be able to work yourself through a process of prioritising your focus areas very quickly,” she says. 

“The design thinking model approach allows you to get quick cut-through. It creates relevance because it’s built in the context of who you are, what you’re doing and where you need to go.”

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is a creative approach to problem-solving which originated in product development as a way to understand and meet the needs of consumers. IDEO, a global design and consulting firm, is credited with popularising the application of design thinking to a broad range of industries. 

“Design thinking has its origins in the training and the professional practice of designers, but these are principles that can be practiced by everyone and extended to every field of activity,” said IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown in 2009. 

Employers are increasingly recognising the value of human-centred design thinking to inform the development of HR initiatives. Global leaders such as AirBnB, Apple, Bank of America, Google, IBM, Nike, and Uber have all adopted design thinking to address a range of workforce challenges, including workplace culture change, skills building and organisational transformation.

At Virgin Australia, following the disruptions to the airline industry brought by the pandemic, the HR team used a design thinking mindset to help navigate a period of significant transformation. 

“Our strategy post-administration was repositioning Virgin Australia as a value carrier in the market. Our strategy specifically puts our people at the centre. We call it Virgin Flair,” says Burquest, who is speaking at AHRI’s National Convention and Exhibition in August.

“It’s all about how we work with our people to rebuild the business in a way that delivers for our customer, [leads to] financial and operational outcomes and makes us a better, more focused business as we move forward.

“Some people thought, ‘How can you possibly get that business back on track?’, but we had a methodical and aspirational strategy that we were chasing [to rebuild the business].”

“Human-centred design thinking forces you to think back on what the business is here to do. It’s not creating a plan that’s HR for HR’s sake.” – Lisa Burquest, Chief People Officer at Virgin Australia

The five stages of design thinking

There are a number of frameworks employers can use to guide them in the design thinking process, including the British Design Council’s Double Diamond framework and American Institution of Graphic Arts’s Head, Heart and Hand model. 

Among the most popular frameworks is the five-step design thinking model developed by the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, which offers a formula for effective human-centred design thinking.

“Human-centred design thinking forces you to think back on what the business is here to do. It’s not creating a plan that’s HR for HR’s sake, it’s creating focus areas and priorities that are directly linked to what the business needs to achieve,” says Burquest.

The Hasso-Plattner Institute’s framework breaks down human-centred design into five distinct stages: 

1. Empathise

Human-centred design must begin with empathy in order to ensure solutions align with the needs of people who will be impacted by them, which are employees in this instance.

By forefronting the voices of employees, employers can get their buy-in and ensure they feel like the changes are happening for them, rather than to them.

In recognition of the diverse needs of different cohorts of employees, Virgin Australia first broke down its workforce into employee personas, from new starters through to long-standing employees close to retirement. Segmenting the workforce in this way helped the team empathise with each group and ensure everyone felt heard and understood.

“During this early stage of transformation, we thought about the moments that matter for our people,” says Burquest. “As we designed our programs, we were taking into account all of these groups and how they might play into the initiative, and making sure it was something that would be engaging for them.”

Download a template to create employee personas here.

2. Define

During the define stage, HR practitioners will converge to determine specific workforce challenges to address, and/or gaps in current HR practices. Framing the challenge in this way can provide structure to the next phase, ideation, and ensure objectives remain consistent, even when methodology changes.

For Virgin Australia, a data-driven approach was key to defining the specific challenges faced by the different employee personas they had formulated. 

“[Data] allows you to dissect your workforce and look at it from different angles, whether its turnover or diversity, [et cetera],” says Burquest. “It’s really important because it helps you build a real case for change. I can’t encourage people enough to look at the data and use the insights to drive how you build out your strategies.” 

3. Ideate

The ideation stage of the design thinking process tends to involve brainstorming sessions and collaborative workshops to generate practical solutions to the defined issues, with input from both employees and leaders.

“[At Virgin Australia], we went through a collaborative process with all of our people around resetting our values, resetting our identity and resetting our expected levels of behaviour,” says Burquest. 

Guided by the objectives set in the Define stage, brainstorm participants should be encouraged to pitch out-of-the-box strategies and build on one another’s ideas. Creativity is a cornerstone of design thinking, and it should be made clear from the outset that innovation and lateral thinking are welcome in these sessions.

4. Prototype

Creating and piloting prototypes of HR programs on smaller employee groups is crucial, since it allows adjustments to be made before the full-scale rollout.

Virgin Australia uses its employee personas to guide the prototype stage of design thinking, which helps them tailor equitable and effective strategies for each cohort, says Burquest.

“We have half a dozen different personas that make up our workforce. We test each of the initiatives against those personas to see if this is going to drive the right outcomes for those team members,” she says.

5. Test

By gathering data and continuous feedback to refine initiatives, HR will continually adjust and test to ensure strategies evolve based on real-world, real-time experiences.

While HR should not be afraid to make changes to their strategies when tests demonstrate deficiencies, Burquest says practitioners should ensure the defined challenges and objectives should always be kept consistent and front-of-mind to ensure the process does not become erratic.

“Sometimes, you might have to make a radical adjustment in some part of your strategy. But you don’t want to be doing that around all of your strategy. You don’t want to be chopping and changing, you want to be evolving,” she says.

“It’s about creating processes that allow you to focus on the business context that matters. In a finite world of resources, what are the priorities that matter most? That helps you control your environment in a sensible way as you move through the process.”

Lisa Burquest will be speaking on navigating todayʼs capability challenges while building for tomorrow at AHRI’s National Convention and Exhibition in August. Sign up today to hear from Lisa and other experts, including Seth Godin, Ravin Jesuthasen and more.

The post How to use design thinking to enhance your HR strategies appeared first on HRM online.

Over the past few years, overcoming resistance to change has become one of HR’s most important strategic priorities.

Faced with rapid advancements in technology, the transformation of our ways of working and a turbulent economic environment, research from Gartner suggests employees are experiencing increased levels of ‘change fatigue’.

This reluctance to embrace change can stifle organisational and cultural growth, leaving employees disengaged and disconnected from the business and the transformation process. 

To avoid resistance to change slowing your business down, it’s imperative to find ways to bring employees along on the journey. The risk of change fatigue in employees falls by 29 percentage points when employers adopt ‘open-source’ transformation strategies and codesign the change with their employees, finds Gartner’s research.

In other words, employers need to ensure people feel that change is happening with them, rather than to them. 

Get employees on board with codesign

Over the past three years, this principle has guided the transformation process at Great Southern Bank during the realignment of the company’s culture and values – part of a major rebrand.

By involving employees from ideation to implementation, the organisation was able to cultivate a sense of belonging and commitment, ensuring a smooth transition and sustainable outcomes.

The success of their engagement efforts resulted in Great Southern Bank being awarded the Best Organisational Development and Change Strategy Award at last year’s AHRI Awards.

“It was the biggest change we had seen in 75 years as an organisation,” says Lisa Behrendt, Head of Culture, People and Leadership at Great Southern Bank. 

“It was incredibly important to us that our people came along on the journey. Our surveys and qualitative feedback showed that they found it really exciting.”

The transformation was catalysed by the customer-owned bank’s decision to rebrand from Credit Union Australia to Great Southern Bank, a move aimed at reinforcing its customer-first ethos and commitment to its new purpose of helping all Australians own their own home. 

“Leaders need to be aligned and committed, and they also need to be open to involving employees and hearing what they have to say.” – Lisa Behrendt, Head of Culture, People and Leadership at Great Southern Bank

The aim of the transformation was not just to alter the company’s external image, but to fundamentally evolve its internal culture and values.

To ensure employees felt aligned with the bank’s new purpose and brand, Chief People Officer Tracey Lake and the people and culture team worked closely with the marketing and corporate affairs teams to take a codesign approach to every aspect of the transformation. Employees were surveyed and consulted on the rebrand itself and the cultural changes that came with it.

The process involved crowdsourcing ideas, voting on new company names and visual designs, and extensive communication to keep the workforce informed and engaged.

Leaders were key to creating the change.

“Leaders need to be aligned and committed, and they also need to be open to involving employees and hearing what they have to say,” says Behrendt.

“That takes a lot of courage, trust and transparency, and that starts at the top – it’s vital to ensuring the transition is going to work.”

Codesign through storytelling

A key element of the company’s rebranding strategy was to align employees with the new purpose to foster a stronger sense of belonging and understanding of the strategic direction of the company.

“We were transforming our culture with new values and behaviours,” says Behrendt. “And part of that was about lining up individual stories and experiences with the broader story of the organisation.”

To facilitate the sharing of these stories, the bank enlisted help from speaker and author Gabrielle Dolan, who spoke alongside Behrendt at AHRI’s recent webinar on transformative strategies for organisational change.

“We asked Gabrielle to run a few big storytelling sessions virtually. They were about establishing how people’s personal stories resonate with stories of the business.

“For example, if we want to influence a customer or a stakeholder to create supporters and advocates for the changes, we can use a personal experience and relate it back to the business context.

“Take my personal experience of moving interstate as an example. This significant change was confronting and at times overwhelming – but also very exciting! Team members experience similar reactions to change as part of a culture transformation. By highlighting a personal experience, we can help our team to embrace the change with excitement, empathy, authenticity and support.”

“You have to be consistent. If you promise people that they’re going to be involved in creating something, you have to follow through on your promise.” – Lisa Behrendt, Head of Culture, People and Leadership at Great Southern Bank

Keeping the process lighthearted and injecting some fun into the workshops helped maintain engagement and ensure employees felt comfortable to share their experiences authentically, she says.

“We take banking seriously, but not ourselves. And they could see themselves in those stories. And [later on], when they would pick up the phone and speak to a customer, they had that passion and desire, they could see themselves as part of something really big, and they knew their part in it.”

Engagement powered by codesign

Feedback from Great Southern Bank’s employees on its codesign approach has been overwhelmingly positive. Sentiment surveys showed employees felt more aligned with the brand and the organisation’s values and purpose. Employee engagement scores also increased from 4.22 out of five in 2021 to 4.47 out of five in 2023, the company’s highest-ever score.  

The success of the rebrand and commitment to the new purpose has also delivered benefits to the bank’s customers. For example, the average amount of time taken for a home loan application to be approved has decreased by more than half since 2021.

“Engagement has been exceptionally high all throughout the change process. In [our surveys], we look at the effect of highly engaged team members on customer calls and customer experience. And what we see is that those who are really engaged, which is most of the organisation, have better customer experience outcomes as rated by the customer.”

Having these achievements recognised with an AHRI Award last year was all the more rewarding for Great Southern Bank because the entire workforce contributed to the outcomes, she says.

For HR professionals looking to adopt a codesign approach like this, she stresses the importance of commitment and authenticity.

“You have to be persistent, and you have to be consistent. If you promise people that they’re going to be involved in creating something, you have to follow through on your promise, and you’ve got to keep going. 

“We’ve been on a journey over three to four years where we’ve been very consistent and very intentional about what we’ve done as an organisation, and we’ve continually listened to our people. They know we’re genuine when we say we want to hear them and we want them to know that we value what they say. That’s been one of our biggest learnings.”

AHRI members can log into their member dashboard to view a free on-demand webinar with Lisa Behrendt and a range of other experts on transformative strategies for organisational change.

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