I recently received this note from one of our newsletter subscribers: “My team was HR Product Design but since our HR functions have not moved into a product focused role it was confusing people. After some research and aligning on the services we offered, we are rebranding to Employee Experience Design.”
This got me thinking about how to decide when and if to build a function in HR that is dedicated to designing HR services and/or the employee experience.
As a designer, I would start by exploring and clearly defining the problem you are trying to solve. This could be something like “How might the HR operating model need to transform to support the needs of employees in an ever-changing work environment?”
From there you can ideate, prototype and test various operating model options.
What might those operating model options be?
Here are a few models that I have either built myself or come across in my research and conversations with HR leaders:
OPTION #1: Embed Agile ways of working across the HR team
Agile is the name of the game when it comes to accelerating HR program design and delivering on the employee experience. We need to reboot the HR organization by embracing an agile mindset – realizing experimentation will be key in successfully navigating an ever-changing work environment.
According to a recent Gartner analysis of 329,411 job descriptions, the global demand for agile skills among HR-related job postings increased 160% over the last three years. Case in point: The Culture Development team at Germany’s Dr. Oetker boasts Agile Coaches who support the organization around team development and team effectiveness.
The recently published book Agile HR serves as an excellent guide for how to get started with Agile in Human Resources.
As you consider integrating agile ways of working into HR, also assess the broader organization. Rachel Clark, Experience Design Team Manager at National Trust, highlights in this LinkedIn post some of the challenges she encountered because outside of HR, her organizations follows a more waterfall-style approach to strategic planning and project management.
OPTION #2: Cross-functional HR teams lead ad hoc employee experience projects
In this model, cross-functional ad hoc teams form to work on employee experience projects. These projects could be led by a designer from outside or inside HR (or co-led as concluded in one of my recent posts). Some HR organizations have started to experiment with agile teaming at the onset of the pandemic. The University of Chicago Medicine for example convened four cross-functional HR task force teams that were charged with supporting employees, either to anticipate their needs or to respond to them. These teams were successful because of their cross-functional makeup and use of design thinking and agile approaches as they tackled the problems at hand.
Governance and stakeholder management are key in this model. Who manages the HR service portfolio? Who has decision making power?
OPTION #3: Build a dedicated employee experience function
This model requires a true commitment by the organization to an employee experience led approach to Human Resources. It’s likely a multi-year transformation journey. I talk to many Employee Experience leaders and the #1 barrier they all encounter is how to communicate the value of what they do to their HR peers. I am always curious to learn how these teams manage their project portfolio: Is it a pull model where business units ask for EX support and if so, how do they prioritize the incoming work? If it’s a push model, how do they articulate the value to the organization? What are the challenges they encounter? To get a sense for how an Employee Experience function can get scaled, check out the approach Damon Deaner took to build IBM’s Employee Experience function.
MY CONCLUSION
Each model has its pros and cons. I think it helps to embrace a design thinker’s experimentation mindset knowing that the initial model you settle on might get tweaked over time. And that’s ok. Case in point: Airbnb, the first to build a dedicated employee experience function in 2015, has evolved their model since its inception.
[Note: This article was originally published as part of the Design Thinking for HR LinkedIn Newsletter.]
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Design Thinking for HR is a biweekly LinkedIn newsletter that aims to inspire HR professionals to experiment with the human-centered design framework. The newsletter is curated by Nicole Dessain, a talent management leader and founder of the human-centered transformation consultancy talent.imperative and the HR.Hackathon Alliance. Nicole is currently writing her first book about Design Thinking for HR. Join the Early Readers’ Community here.