I was lucky enough to give the keynote at the CIPD Change Management conference the other week and one of the speakers there referenced how they’d used change personas to help deal with the variety of different responses to a change initiative. It reminded me of a fundamental principle which I’ve always stuck to when I’ve worked with HR and change teams and one that I think we’re at risk of losing in the AI-will-solve-everything gold rush.
Everything we know about the world of work is about to be upended – with AI infiltrating every part of the business and a near-to-mid term future where AI agents will be working alongside FTEs we need a different type of organisation design, to understand the jagged edge of AI adoption (PDF), to develop strategies for machine-human collaboration and AI literacy fast, but more than anything we need to take a humanistic approach to engaging staff on this journey and not leaving people behind or disengaged, disenfranchised and disenchanted. The current feeling of uncertainty is very real and is unlikely to go away anytime soon.
One of the delights of being a generalist is the ability to make connections across different types of work that I do. Apropos of this I’ve found that service design principles and tools can be a rich and undervalued source of inspiration and innovation in employee experience (EX). And there’s a particular reason why. Amazon have long talked about starting with the customer and ‘working backwards’. A key part of why they do this, is to bake in customer-centricity to everything that they do right from the beginning. And it also ensures that teams are not making assumptions about how to solve problems for customers, and that they are balancing business and customer needs throughout (this is ‘outside in’ thinking).
It’s remarkably easy when you’re designing services to start with the business needs, focus on the business benefits and solve the challenges in ways that make most sense for the business (this is ‘inside-out’ thinking). In doing this we risk forgetting about designing in ways that take account of HOW customers want to solve problems or achieve outcomes. We make assumptions. We do stuff that makes no sense for customers. We end up with nonsensical systems, journeys and interfaces. Scott Brinker once called this being ‘dangerously efficient’. It’s efficient for the business but not for the customer. And god knows there’s enough of that around.
For CX (customer experience) we can substitute EX. When we design employee experiences and journeys we are at significant risk of making some pretty big assumptions about how staff want to do their best work, the concerns they might have, the questions they need answers to, how they want to solve problems and achieve outcomes, the reasons they are resisting change. So ‘working backwards’ is helpful in balancing the needs of the business whilst not leaving employees behind, and as AI reimagines the workplace this is only going to become more important.
There are some useful techniques which bring service design thinking into employee experience innovation.
Personas: Staff personas can be based on role, tenure, life stage, aspirations, and/or challenges, and provide a good foundation for understanding unique needs around onboarding, learning, collaboration or change. It prevents everything being a one-size-fits-all solution
Jobs-to-be-done: I find it particularly useful to get teams to work back from functional needs (fundamental goals) and emotional needs (how staff want problems solved, what constitutes a good or poor experience, gains and pains, what they value, how people feel). Even using foundational CX tools like the Value Proposition Canvas helps define EX in a much more nuanced way, especially when done against specific employee personas.
Using this canvas is a real flip of thinking from the way that most HR teams approach EX design. It surfaces latent requirements, expectations and goals and forces you to work back from real needs.
Employee journey mapping: understanding functional and emotional needs (alongside other criteria like sources of influence and information) through a range of employee journeys from onboarding to development to change journeys. This helps us to avoid employees feeling disconnected from strategies, leadership decisions or new technologies but also to better handle change. The speaker at the conference mentioned that people resist loss rather than change, which is a great way of framing the kind of support people often require.
These simple techniques tailor solutions to real human needs, help identify pain points and moments that matter, anchor innovation in outcomes not systems, surface hidden challenges and the emotional side of change and aligns solutions to both business and employee needs. With the tsunami of change that is about to happen in EX due to AI we should, above everything, avoid making assumptions about what employees really care about and design experiences that bring them on the journey in inclusive ways. And the only way to do that is to truly understand what they need.
A version of this post appeared on my weekly Substack of AI and digital trends, and transformation insights. To join our community of over ten thousand subscribers you can sign up to that here.
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Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash
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