What is employee experience design?

What is employee experience design?

Employee experience design is applying design thinking to how we understand people and their experience. And how we develop, test and iterate solutions to meet their expectations (as far as is possible)

Put it another way. EX design is how we answer the question: “What do we about employee experience?”

Every employee has an experience of you as an employer, whether it has been intentionally created or not.

How do you improve employee experience?

Improving employee experience is about intention – about understanding what experience people need to thrive in your organisation and then focusing on those points in the experience that matter the most to them.

Only by being intentional about how you craft the many significant, as well as everyday, experiences people have of you, can you hope to architect the larger, overall EX. 

That all comes down to EX design – applying design principles, first to how we understand people and their needs and expectations, and then to how we develop, test and iterate solutions to make the experience the best it can be.

We use the word best because it’s flexible. That matters, because EX is not one-size-fits-all and, in reality, it involves compromises. What best looks like is often a  balancing act between three competing and sometimes shifting demands – your organisational context, what the work requires, and your people.

So EX design is about continuously keeping in focus the many small, medium and large experiences an employee has with you. Our approach draws on two disciplines – design thinking and positive psychology. We borrow and adapt from them with pride.  So why does does this combination work?

• They’re both inherently optimistic so we can start every EX design process with the confidence that something is achievable. 

• They both put people and their needs, desires and expectations at the heart of everything – this is perhaps the biggest challenge to more traditional approaches to human resources and other related people-focused activities, such as L&D, recruitment etc. Our approach starts with empathy, not a requirements spreadsheet.

• Design thinking may be criticised by some for being too prescriptive in its approach – you have to be a bit of a design aficionado to be in the guts of this debate – but for us, it provides guardrails that make it easy for non-designers to get started understanding and working on an EX challenge.

• It’s flexible. Yes there are phases of activity and a set of tools you can apply within each, but EX design tools and activities are practical and can be flexed to meet your needs. Choose the EX design tools that work for you. 

•  Design thinking enables us to tackle something that might seem big, scary and unfathomable by offering clear and simple starting points. 

As we navigate the pandemic and wonder what the future of work and workplaces will look like, there’s never been a better or more critical time to keep human experience at the centre of everything. Only by doing so will we have organisations where people can thrive and where they feel safe to stretch themselves, learn in the flow of work and continuously adapt to new and changing situations. 

EX design isn’t a nice to have. It should be business as usual.