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.

Who would have thought that emotions would contribute to better innovation and business success? Yet that’s exactly what researchers have found; the best ideas and solutions come from better emotional connections.

Empathy is now pretty much universally recognised as an integral part of the innovation process and a foundation for creative development.

A prerequisite for solving “wicked problems”

The design thinking approach to innovation, as popularised by Stanford d.school and the global design firm IDEO, has developed the concept of empathy to make it inseparable from the process. Design thinking is a process widely used by businesses today to come up with new products and services. Leading innovative companies such as Apple and Google use design thinking on a day-to-day basis.

The process entails looking at a challenge that may appear to have no clear solution (known in design circles as a wicked problem), identifying the underlying issue, then trying to understand the different perspectives and needs related to this issue.

The designer will initially identify the desires and needs of the users and then use a prototyping process to develop products, systems and services that best meet these needs.

The outside-in approach

CEO and IDEO President Tim Brown says an outward-looking perspective and empathy are prerequisites for innovation. “A sense of inquiry, of curiosity, is essential for innovation, and the quickest way for removing curiosity in my opinion is to have organisations that are too inward-facing,” he says. “A sense of empathy for the world and for the people whose problems they might be trying to solve – that’s essential.”

Empathy provides the “human-centred” focus in design thinking. It’s the link between the person designing the new product or solution and the end user.

By starting with empathy, the designer can understand and relate to the issues the user faces and therefore create designs that best meet their needs.

Solving the shopping trolley challenge

As an example of how this can work in practice, let’s consider the challenge of shopping trolleys.

Have you ever noticed how difficult trolleys can be to negotiate around supermarket aisles, how items become wedged or buried deep in the basket, and how frustratingly long it can take to get through the checkout process?

IDEO was set the challenge of designing a new shopping cart. To deal with shoppers’ frustration at having to wrestle a full trolley up and down the aisles, IDEO designers came up with ideas for carts that are more like skeletons providing a frame for baskets to be slotted in and stacked to allow for collecting and searching for a few items at a time.

Hooks were added around the edges of the skeletal structure on which shoppers could hang plastic bags, and they then designed a cart concept with a scanner on the handle, so shoppers could do the scanning as they place the items in the basket rather than having to go through the whole process at the checkout.

Connect to create

Here are some tips to help you start emotionally connecting to achieve more creative and effective outcomes:

• Identify the end user. Consider who will be using the product or service – you might like to develop personas or connect with actual potential users.
•  Put yourself in the end user’s shoes. Use ethnographic research tools to help you identify the individual challenges and concerns of your end users. Observations, interviews, focus groups and empathy maps can all help to create a vivid picture of who the end user is and what they really need.
• Involve the end user in the innovation process. Invite them to share in the brainstorming process, provide ideas and refinements for prototypes, test products and provide feedback on potential solutions.

An emotional connection through empathy can mean all the difference between the invention of a basic product and a powerful people-focused advance.

Gaia and Andrew Grant are the authors of “The Innovation Race: How to change a culture to change the game”. This article is an adapted excerpt from the book.

The post What does empathy have to do with innovation? appeared first on HRM online.

Recently, I was invited to give a guest lecture at TAPMI Manipal B-school, a university in India, for their HR Conclave. I chose to speak about “Employee Engagement: Happiness Index in HRM”, which is professionally a very close topic to my heart, as it’s one of the main priorities in my everyday life as an HR Business Partner.

One of the big takeaways for me from this session was about the importance of people in any business and why engagement plays such a pivotal role. Too often we get caught up with revenue and margins so that we are blindsided to everything else — to our employees, their aspirations, their motivation and passion. In today’s world, where there is no dearth of machines or technology, people have become the primary source of competitive advantage. Any organisation can win in the marketplace if they get their talent strategy in place. When we say talent strategy it includes everything from understanding and assessing talent, hiring the right talent, developing the right people, focusing on building leaders, creating an awesome culture and people engagement.

The factors influencing engagement for any generation are economics, politics and social lifestyle. But when we specifically look at millennials, for example, some of their common traits are ambition and taking risks. They prefer more transparency, less bureaucracy and have a need for identification and role models.

The general perception and myth about HR is that their job is to conduct fun activities and organise parties or games for employees. Employee engagement is often confused with fun. Engagement, however, is a much deeper aspect which drives the individual to go that extra mile voluntarily and where people do something not because they have been told to but because they want to.

Engagement is about a stronger connection that a person has with something in the firm – it can be the work, the manager, the vision – anything. Identifying and measuring the causes and factors that drive engagement are critical because they serve as the basis of creating an effective ‘intervention’. As for every HR intervention, the holy grail of ROI will come up even in the case of engagement initiatives. Apart from the usual measures like retention numbers, ESAT and CSAT, engagement is a softer aspect which often cannot be measured directly. Employee engagement, motivation and satisfaction are correlated but not the same.

You can say that your people are engaged when you see them proactively taking initiatives and helping team members, going above and beyond their job responsibilities and bringing forth creative ideas and innovation. Also, their attitude and behaviour when the chips are down, when they are happy and even when they quit is a direct indication of their engagement levels.

We need to focus on transforming events into employee experience and use Design Thinking as an approach to achieve that. The top priority for HR today is to build a great work culture. This is simply a shared way of doing something with passion, and to achieve that we need to focus on creating a great employee experience which will lead to an engaged workforce.

Rekha Nair is a senior HR business partner at Brillio.

The post Why engagement is not about employee entertainment appeared first on HRM online.