A Service Design Framework for Employee Experience
The Employee Experience (EX) encompasses all interactions an employee has with their employer, from the recruitment process to their departure and beyond. Investing in employee experience not only gives more quality of life to the people working at a company, but also lead to improved satisfaction, retention, and organisational performance. Jacob Morgan, in his book “The Employee Experience Advantage” highlights that companies with superior employee experiences are six times more likely to be listed as best places to work, 4.4 times more profitable, and generate 2.9 times more revenue per employee. Additionally, Gartner reports that these companies see 9% higher revenue and 22% better employee performance.
The Service Design Approach
When we talk about the employee lifecycle, we are talking about different processes: attraction, recruitment, hiring, onboarding, support and development, offboarding… Service Thinking invites us to think of all of those processes as services. This perspective is supported by Vargo and Lusch's 5 axioms of Service-Dominant Logic:
- Service is the fundamental basis of exchange.
- Value is co-created by multiple actors, always including the beneficiary.
- All social and economic actors are resource integrators.
- Value is always uniquely and phenomenologically determined by the beneficiary.
- Value co-creation is coordinated through actor-generated institutions and institutional arrangements.
What makes Service Design such a powerful discipline to approach Employee Experience is how it's equipped to understand the different actors and intentionally configure the institutional arrangements where value co-creation will happen.
Some of the competences of Service Design are:
- Qualitative Insight and Research
- Design of digital and physical touchpoints
- Concept development and articulation of service strategy
- Backstage tools such as improved processes or training programs
- Visual co-creative process
Employee Experience is Service Design at Scale
The typical Service Design process will look something like this:
- Mapping the current journey
- Identifying improvement opportunities
- Defining the internal operations needed to provide the service
- Consolidating the new journey
- Rolling out the development of the touchpoints
But Employee Experience is the outcome of the interaction of an employee with several processes, so it requires a systemic approach to ensure the consistency across different the various journeys one goes through in their time at an organisation.
This challenge was evident when EGGS was invited to undertake an Employee Experience project for an organization with over 100,000 employees. As part of that project, I developed a framework for approaching Employee Experience through Service Design.
The Framework
The Employee Experience must deliver Purpose, through Services, oriented by Principles and supported by DesignOps
1. Defining the purpose
The primary goal of Employee Experience should be delivering Purpose, which is the core reason employees join and stay at a company. In the realm of Employee Experience, this is often referred to as the Employee Value Proposition (EVP). The first step in working with EX is to define your EVP.
2. Establish your Design Principles
The principles of Employee Experience represent the desired culture of the organization. They should be connected to the Employer Brand and be actionable. Consider prompts that anyone designing a service in your organization should follow. These principles should encompass the people in the organization, how relationships should develop, how environments should be set, and how systems should be structured.
3. Design your services
With your EVP and Principles established, use Service Design methods to enhance existing and new processes in a way that is consistent with the Employer Brand.
4. Establish DesignOps
Since Employee Experience is Service Design at scale, ensure that everyone involved in designing and running services in your organisation is aligned and has a shared understanding of methods and tools. A good start is to create an EX handbook in a format that can be easily shared across the organisation. The handbook can include the EVP, principles, methods, tools, templates, and other resources to democratize the knowledge needed to deliver the desired EX. Additionally, establish structured ways of capturing and sharing insights and metrics, such as a shared repository with research findings.
By following these steps, you will be on your way to achieving improved EX through a Systemic Service Design approach.
Let me know your thoughts!
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Mau Medeiros, Jan Walter Paar, Paal Holter and Camila Bastos for the discussions that inspired this framework.
