The Employee Experience Project

Overview

A 7,000+ employee enterprise wanted a research-informed approach to redesigning their employee onboarding experience to attract and retain top talent. Using market research, stakeholder interviews, quantitative and qualitative employee insights, and ideation workshops, I worked with a team of designers to meet this business goals. 

The Context

The post-pandemic landscape has resulted in the advancement of technological tools and shifts in cultural expectations that are drastically changing what it means to "go to work". 

The Ask

How can our company re-design our overall employee experience to attract and retain talent? 

Our Stakeholders

The Human Resources (HR) department approached our design studio to help "revamp" the employee experience at the enterprise. They oversee the standard processes for employee experience, from hiring to off-boarding. Their hope was to redesign employee journeys into and through the company and to standardize this journey through creating tools that people leaders across the enterprise could use to attract, train, and develop talent. 

The Team

(1) Project Manager, (3) Service Designers, (1) Visual Designer, (1) Service Design Intern (Me) 

Project Timeline

~16 weeks 

The Approach

1. Background Research and Discovery 

What do we already know about the employee experience at our company? With such an expansive topic as "employee experience", we first needed to explore and refine our "problem". 

I combed through company survey data to identify key pain points in the employee experience. I found that employees felt disconnected from the company's mission and vision. 

I conducted a market research "horizon scan" to understand how other companies were thinking about and approaching this topic. What were best practices and what could we potentially adopt? I found that companies were prioritizing employee voice and feedback through informal and formal mentorship structures. 

I also attended stakeholder interviews to gather opinions on the most pressing issues leading to employee turnover. I found that there were gaps and variation in how people leaders at the company were onboarding employees, leading to discrepancies in how integrated and motivated employees felt. 

I synthesized insights from across these data inputs and presented the findings to our stakeholders. 

We decided to revamp the employee experience by focusing our research and design on employee onboarding as the first stage of the employee journey. Our refined challenge became: How can we evolve our newcomer experience and set them up to succeed? 

2. Recruitment and Interviews with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)

With thousands of employees at the enterprise, we needed to decide areas who we would talk to. Our goal was to hear from both people leaders who create and oversee onboarding processes and newcomers who were recently onboarded. We developed screener surveys to distribute across the enterprise via email for employees at a range of levels and positions to opt-in to this research opportunity. 

I designed two sets of interview protocols for people leaders and newcomers to understand their experiences as someone being onboarded and as someone responsible for onboarding new hires. These interviews included ideation activities where employees could create solutions for improving their experiences. 

We began to reach saturation after about 20 interviews. As a team, we synthesized insights across interviews and began to see the patterns across newcomer and people leader experiences with onboarding. We developed a list of recommendations for our stakeholders to implement in order to help people leaders and newcomers have a successful onboarding experience. These included but were not limited to: buddy/mentorship systems, agendas for 1-1 meetings, checklists for new employees, templates for onboarding emails and new hire "toolkits". 

3. HR "All-Hands" Design-Thinking and Ideation Workshop

The next step was to "test" our recommendations with those who know it best: HR. Our design studio held an ideation workshop for the 160+ HR team to get their subject matter expertise on what solutions were actionable and feasible at this time. Which ideas should be prioritized and which should be put on the back burner? 

The Final Deliverables

We pulled together our insights from our interviews and workshop to create journey maps that characterized the typical newcomer experience in its current state, highlighting pain points and potential gaps across the enterprise. These gaps showed opportunity areas for where we could standardize processes for people leaders by offering different tools mentioned above, such as new hire toolkits and checklists. 

In addition to these concrete tools and recommendations, we developed a new conceptual framework of the employee experience that was attuned to the individual, relational, and technical needs of employees. This sought to evolve the company's employee experience framework to be more inclusive and responsive to the changing cultural expectations and needs of employees in a post-pandemic, highly flexible and hybrid work environment of the 21st century. This framework centered the autonomy, flexibility, and growth of employees--key findings from our interviews and ideation sessions.