The pressure is on for organisations to attract and retain talent. Regardless of a company’s location or size, attracting and retaining top talent ranks as the number-one internal stressor for CEOs and other C-Suite executives globally in 2020, according to the Conference Board. A modern employee experience that matches often seamless customer experience is a big differentiator.

Employee expectations are ratcheting up against HR as comparisons are made to frictionless customer experience outside of the office. The organisation, too, has new expectations on HR: demands like “Help me to build an agile organisation,” or “Give me actionable insights to make better people decisions” are becoming increasingly common. How can HR help the organisation, its employees and themselves?

Changing expectations requires new ways of thinking about people and designing people management strategies. One of the hottest new approaches is Design Thinking. In the 2016 Global Human Capital Trends report from Deloitte, respondents at companies where HR delivers the highest levels of value are almost five times more likely to be using design thinking in their programs than their peers. This article will look at how Design Thinking can be used as a tool to understand and improve the customer experience of HR.

So, what is Design Thinking?

According to Chris Rowlands, one of the instructors on the course ‘Incorporating Design Thinking into HR,’ Design Thinking can be described as:

“an iterative approach to solving complex problems. It’s human centric and that means we place the customer at the centre of the process. We take an outside-in rather than an inside-out approach and that means we can answer complex questions but also find the right questions to answer.”

Let’s break that down –

An iterative approach

Design Thinking enables HR to think beyond the typical process and programmatic approach to service delivery and focus instead on the experience and outcomes that it is looking to drive.

The principles of iteration – trying, failing and improving – are critical to success in Design Thinking. It cannot be a waterfall approach, where one solution is rolled out, the program ends and then for years it’s never improved or assessed.

Human centric, with the customer at the centre

Design Thinking is based on understanding the in-depth needs of different stakeholder profiles – to conduct Design Thinking is to firmly put yourself in the shoes of your stakeholder (this is why empathy is a crucial element of the practice). Its goal is to generate solutions that bring value to all stakeholders. In HR's case, this could be the managers, employees, or candidates that experience any part of the HR process.

Companies like Apple, Starbucks and Google, are known to have been using Design Thinking as a way to drive new products and services for some time. Design Thinking enables organisations to consider new approaches to products and processes, driving innovation that allows them to meet their customer needs more effectively. 

An example from within HR comes from GE. Back in 2015, GE made simplification a core business strategy. To achieve this, they implemented design thinking. The HR team uses agile methodologies for product development to help individuals “do less” and “focus more”. 

From the department of L&D, brands such as Nestlé and Qualcomm have used design thinking when developing their learning programs, to ensure that the individual’s own work context is the focus, rather than it being all about the presenter. This leads to a more engaging work experience which is connected to better skills retention.

How to get started with Design Thinking

The three broad stages in Design Thinking are:

To get started with Design Thinking, let’s look at the first stage: discover and explore. There are two key components to make sense of here: 

1. Stakeholders

2. The Question

Stakeholders 

HR has to step into the shoes of the stakeholders that they are improving services for and really understand how they currently experience the service. All pre-conceived notions and assumptions have to be left at the door.

For this reason, empathy is one of the stages of the five-stage model of Design Thinking proposed by the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (d.school): 

 “[Empathy] is crucial to a human-centred design process such as Design Thinking, and empathy allows design thinkers to set aside his or her own assumptions about the world in order to gain insight into users and their needs.”

Interested in learning more about Design Thinking? Take a look at our online Digital HR Certifications on myHRfuture

One tool that is becoming more widely used to understand the stakeholder experience is a journey map. Journey mapping is an opportunity for HR to understand and visualise the various stages and touch points (interactions) throughout the service delivery.

Another helpful tool is to understand stakeholders as ‘personas,’ which allows HR to remain user-centric throughout the process. Creating personas involves creating fictional versions of the various stakeholders, which highlight their needs, goals and behaviour patterns. For example, a ‘new graduate’ persona might have very different expectations of the application process on your career site than a ‘mid-manager’ persona with 10+ years of experience. Digging into these details allows HR to really understand who their customer is and what makes them tick.

The Question 

“If there is no consensus about the fundamentals, it is useless to make plans”

Confucius

Trying to jump straight to the solution is a very natural human disposition. Solutions equal progress, betterment and advancement. Problems are seen as abstract; they make us uncomfortable. But understanding the business problem upfront is at the heart of every successful people analytics project and must be tackled head on.

Take time to eke out the specific challenge HR is trying to address for the stakeholders involved. Use the Design Thinking principle of iteration here too! When you think you’ve got it, double-check – pressure test it one more time. Iterate: Does the question need tweaking?

To further understand the Discover & Explore, Design, Validate & Activate phases of the design thinking take a look at our online course ‘Implementing Design Thinking in HR,’ Throughout this course we go into the detail of each and offer some helpful tools to fully flesh out the personas and get to the bottom of the business question.

Design Thinking can be used in all aspects of HR 

Design Thinking can be used across all aspects of HR’s remit. Right from the initial attraction and identification of potential employees, to assigning them to specific roles, finding opportunities to transition them into new roles, and ultimately through to retaining and developing key people. From the earliest stages, Design Thinking allows us to understand how our ideal candidate searches for a job and what they use to evaluate and compare companies and opportunities. In later stages, it provides insight into what people want and need, their experience along the way, the touch points that allow HR to create a better experience and the goals HR must set in order to fully utilise and maintain key people.

Master Design Thinking with myHRfuture

The myHRfuture academy is a learning experience platform for HR professionals looking to invest in their careers. We have many online HR certifications that are designed for People Analytics professionals and HR Business Partners to help them build their knowledge and get a People Analytics certification or a certification in Digital HR and understand how to become more digital and data-driven. All of our online HR certifications reflect the core HR skills you need to develop for the future, giving you a professional edge while providing evidence of the skills you’ve mastered, helping you get ahead and press PLAY on your career for only £25 per month.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ian Bailie is the Managing Director of myHRfuture.com and an advisor and consultant for start-ups focused on HR technology and People Analytics, including Adepto, Worklytics and CognitionX.  In his previous role as the Senior Director of People Planning, Analytics and Tools at Cisco Systems, he was responsible for delivering the tools and insights to enable and transform the planning, attraction and management of talent across the organisation globally.  Ian is passionate about HR technology and analytics and how to use both to transform the employee experience and prepare companies for the Future of Work.