Design thinking is taking center stage in improving employee engagement and experience at the workplace. HR teams are looking at how to better manage and improve the employee experience.
Design Thinking refers to the intentional process of creating the employee experience by rethinking that experience from the employee’s viewpoint. This includes candidates and alumni employees.
The Danger of Technology in Production
The rise of mobile and cloud computing technology has had a massive impact on the way people work and collaborate these days. These applications have opened up new levels of access to information and collaboration, but they have also created a whole new set of problems.
Employees are flooded with information and updates from multiple sources, personal and official. The constant updates can be overwhelming to many.
Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is increasingly impacting a growing section of the workforce. FOMO often provokes feelings of anxiety and restlessness, generated by competitive thoughts that others are experiencing more pleasure, success, or fulfillment in their lives than they actually are.
FOMO can cause employees to repeatedly check their text messages, missed phone calls, social media, and other platforms. It can also cause employees to linger longer to participate in casual conversations in the workplace.
Social and collaboration platforms make it possible for employees to engage in conversations that can be shaped around each employee’s work needs and schedules. Employees don’t miss out because the conversation spans time and distance.
But, with social and collaboration platforms making inroads into the workplace, HR now has a new challenge. Decisions on how people communicate, collaborate, consume organizational updates, etc. all have implications on employee engagement.
In a typical organization, there are dozens of data repositories. These include communication & collaboration suites, platforms for updating timesheets, leave applications, managing calendars, and so on.
Remembering passwords to all the platforms can be a challenge for the average employee, not to mention different user interfaces and restrictions.
The key is being intentional about the platforms adopted for employee use. The right platforms allow employees to collaborate in real time, discuss and problem solve without additional distractions and stress.
Check out how to connect the work tools you love with Thanks
Employee Engagement and Technology
With the war for talent raging in full force, HR and top leadership at companies have started thinking about employee engagement and experience the same way marketing teams have spent the last decade thinking about customer experience. Too much complexity in platforms and technology applications used by companies decreases productivity and eventually leads to disengagement.
Technology should be able to produce the desired results, disseminate relevant information, and improve communication. But, too often information shared is scattered, distracting, and irrelevant.
“People need their interactions with technologies and other complex systems to be simple, intuitive, and pleasurable.” Harvard Business Review
When the right applications are used, productivity increases, but the opposite happens if the wrong applications are used, or if too many applications are introduced to employees.
There’s a subtle but definite shift underway at top companies to put design principles at the core of designing how the enterprise works.
The New Frontier For HR
To better engage the employees, and help manage complexity, HR must incorporate design thinking when architecting programs. This puts the employee experience at the center. Organizations can achieve an uptick in employee engagement by leveraging design thinking to make work easier, efficient, fulfilling, and rewarding.
In HBR, Jon Kolko highlights a core set of principles that one must keep in mind while building a design-centric culture.
- Focus on users’ experiences, especially their emotional ones:
- Create models to examine complex problems.
- Use prototypes to explore potential solutions.
- Tolerate failure.
- Exhibit thoughtful restraint.
Now traditionally HR solutions are structured as programs or processes. But that has to change and leaders have to now think as if they are “solution architects”. A good architect will have a complete picture of not only the new part being designed but also the implications it has on all existing parts of the employees’ current work.
Because “design is empathetic, it implicitly drives a more thoughtful, human approach to business” Harvard Business Review.
Behavioral Economics is one of the major drivers in how organizations design their customer experiences. Now those principles can be adapted to the design of Employee Engagement and workplace experiences.
Design thinking relies heavily on an understanding of how people actually use a particular technology or go through a particular process instead of an assumption of how they “should be using it.”
For example, some of the questions HR teams might ask when designing a culture of recognition are:
- What motivates employees at work?
- How do they see themselves aligned with the organizational goals? What do they value?
- How do they express those values at work?
Finding answers to questions like these, coupled with the design principles listed above, is the key to designing world-class employee engagement architectures. It is not easy, but the rewards flow for a very long time when done right!
Conclusion
Choosing the right applications that employees interact with is critical. Applications that allow instant communication and that can help employees to solve problems without leaving their desk increase productivity.
Likewise, Thanks provides real-time feedback from peers and managers. This improves employee engagement and helps employees to feel like they are part of something bigger.
Learn how recognition can be easy and effective through the Thanks platform
About Thanks
Thanks is a leading provider of a recognition-based platform that increases communication, builds teamwork, and makes recognition a part of company culture. Fast, easy and simple Thanks makes it easy to bring data-driven employee recognition to your entire organization. O.C. Tanner purchased the Thanks platform in 2019 to fulfill the recognition needs of smaller businesses.
Thanks customers benefit from the same decades of research in employee motivation and company culture that O.C. Tanner enterprise clients enjoy, but in a product that is geared for fast, easy and simple deployment. Whether you’re starting a recognition program or improving and expanding on what you already have, Thanks has everything you need to engage your people with effective, scalable recognition. Thanks is a subsidiary of OC Tanner.