Employee Empowerment through Creative Innovation: Rethinking EX Strategies
As organisations grapple with how to maintain staff engagement in our bold new hybrid world, a renewed focus on Employee Experience has led to jobs in People gaining more exposure. As the world of work continues to evolve beyond the old norms, so should our approaches to managing, interacting with, and incentivising employees. FSC’s Head of People, Avalyn Kasahara, explores what People teams can learn from the highly developed CX methodologies found in the creative industries.
“What does creativity mean in a People role? In my opinion, it means challenging the status quo and finding new ways to connect with the people I serve: the employees I’m there to support. ”
Prior to joining my first Creative Agency, I would never have called myself a creative. In People roles in large corporations, I always felt part of the operations of the business: inwardly focused on increasing efficiency and productivity.
On reflection, though, I can see how wrong this stance was. Doubling down on ‘I’m not a creative’ was a pretty lame excuse for not being creative in my approach.
But what does creativity mean in a People role? In my opinion, it means challenging the status quo and finding new ways to connect with the people I serve: the employees I’m there to support.
But let’s rewind a bit here and talk about what Employee Experience means these days. In those early days of my career, where I spent a lot of time in corporate People teams, it was all about the tangible: what benefits do we offer? What are our policies? Do people know their objectives? Behaviour was on the agenda, but only insofar as how it aligned to the spray painted values we had on the walls. We were led by the C-Suite on what these ‘behaviours’ were… via a bunch of statements on a page such as ‘we are innovative in our approach to serving our customers’.
You can probably imagine how successful that was. We’d often gather at the end of a national or global change programme in exasperation as the leadership scratched their heads and asked ‘why aren’t people changing their behaviours? Why aren’t they adopting the new tech/processes/approach?’ (Delete as appropriate, but it was usually all).
For any of us working daily with our colleagues, it was pretty obvious. We didn’t know what they really wanted, and they didn’t know how to connect those statements on a page to their day-to-day.
And so began our frustratingly slow journey into researching what our employees needed. We kicked-off with a company wide pulse survey (insert eye rolling here). Sure, a start, but in isolation pretty useless – and we could never get the completion rates higher, or get the detailed responses we needed to get down to the crux of what was causing issues.
Now, I’m being a bit harsh here. There were great organisations out there, like Towards Maturity, who were doing a lot more in this area. But internally, we were dragging our heels. I think subconsciously, we didn’t want to open Pandora's Box, and find out that actually, the workforce had changed so drastically from when HR reigned supreme that we had a ton of work to do.
Discovering the Tools of CX
It was around this time I finally jacked it all in in the corporate world, moved into creative agencies – and started working with Creatives. I worked with Service Designers, CX Researchers and Strategists. It was enlightening. It was exciting. And it was incredibly frustrating.
Because here, I found proven, developed methodologies for understanding customers’ behaviours. Tools and processes so advanced that they were reinventing 100 year old businesses. But at these same businesses that were so focused on a complete overhaul to their customer experience, I often felt that the employee experience was an afterthought. Investment into the employees was only to drive a better customer experience – the employees were never considered to be customers themselves, deserving of the same level of study and attention. And for me, this became a clear opportunity for cross-pollination between practices. I had spent my whole career focused on the employee experience, but had lacked the tools and practices to get the data I needed to improve that experience. And here they were – just being applied with a strong focus on the customer.
Now, this has changed significantly, particularly in the last few years as organisations began to understand that a good employee experience is a significant competitive advantage. Like most People professionals, my LinkedIn is flooded with posts about how businesses ‘put their people first’ and ‘understand their employees holistically’ (I mean, most don’t even use the word employees anymore; it’s all people, or team, or – and I almost choke on this one – family). We know what the drivers are: changing employee needs and behaviours as new generations join the workforce, a war for talent, hybrid working practices, and a global pandemic. All of this has led to a key change – People folk now have a proper seat at the table. There are more of us on Leadership teams than ever before, so let’s our newfound opportunities wisely.
Because consultancies are. More than ever before, we’re seeing more and more of them zero in or refocus on culture and employee experience – and if they are anything like FSC, they too will be using the tools of the Service Designers and CX Researchers to run proper, data-driven change programmes for their clients.
Let’s take a look at some of the work we’ve done at FSC, where we’ve created our own methodology for delivering change programmes which includes a development of the double diamond design process (discover, define, design and deliver), our own wheel of culture, and and a suite of As Is analysis tools aimed at providing an in-depth diagnostic analysis of a client’s current culture, pain points, and opportunities for improvement.
Combatting Change Fatigue at NTT DATA UK&I
We ran two culture transformation programmes for our clients at the end of last year using this approach. For NTT DATA UK&I, the challenge was clear: they had recently been through a merger, right at the point when organisations were looking at ‘what’s next?’ as we came back into the world of work after the pandemic. With all the change they were experiencing, they had a number of large tech and operational integrations happening at one time, which was causing change fatigue. It also meant they needed a lean and fast moving culture transformation to run in parallel with these programmes.
“At these same businesses that were so focused on a complete overhaul to their customer experience, I often felt that the employee experience was an afterthought. Investment into the employees was only to drive a better customer experience – the employees were never considered to be customers themselves, deserving of the same level of study and attention.”
Using our approach, we totally immersed ourselves in the business, reviewing whatever data and documentation was available – from org charts to exit interviews, business plans to individual development plans, cultural initiatives to maternity policies. We consumed it all.
Conducting and sharing the As Is analysis was fundamental here. With two cultures (with vast differences) running simultaneously and without much integration, it was almost impossible for the People teams to be able to effectively influence the employee experience. Having a clear understanding of the culture as it was, by identifying the pain points and needs of all employees across our wheel of employee experience (no matter which company they were initially part of), we were able to highlight that in fact, their needs and frustrations were much the same.
We used a number of research tools to do this, conducting 8 leadership interviews, over 60 employee interviews, a company wide survey, and observations within the office and online meetings. But key here was bringing in methodologies from creative practices too. We ran employee lifecycle workshops, analysing each stage with tenured and new employees.
Meanwhile, we also conducted a Best in Class and Competitor Analysis. Combining this with the data we had from our research, we were able to accurately position NTT DATA UK&I in the market.
One of the key concerns the People team had was that the business was still referring to their people by the companies they had joined from. To support the People team in moving away from this approach and to prioritise the programmes and activities they were running, we also built psychological based profiles of their employees, removing the differentiation between companies, and focusing on what drove their people; their needs, their motivations, their reasons for coming to work. We used these profiles later, when looking at the prioritisation of opportunities.
All our research led to over 160 pain points that we grouped into over 100 needs. And then it was time to engage the employees to co-design the culture that they wanted to create. We ran a 50 person hackathon, where we brought the pain points and needs into the room and teams worked on creating opportunities for solving them.
We were left with over 100 opportunities. We applied a MoSoCoW to these, to map them out based on complexity, and applied them to a transformation map that gave the People team the tools they needed to action Quick Wins and plan for Long Term Heroes.
The NTT DATA UK&I team were able to immediately take action armed with the project outputs. And we went on to use our approach on our next transformation project with our client Little Dot Studio.
Aligning Culture with Recent Growth at Little Dot Studio
Here, the challenge was different. Little Dot Studio had grown rapidly, and were now recognised as global leaders in digital content. With the rate of growth they had experienced, they were ready to embark on a wide scale transformation to analyse and improve their operating model and enable them to move from growing to scaling, and work smarter, not harder.
Again, we followed our methodology, conducting interviews and reviewing documentation – from 10 months of town hall recordings, org charts, guides for managers and employee onboarding, to strategy docs, client lists, employee statistics and exit interviews and central services updates.
We augmented the discovery approach we ran with NTT DATA UK&I by conducting not only stakeholder and employee interviews, but also interviews with their clients – giving us further outside-in perspective. We expanded the observations we conducted even further too, joining virtual huddles and running 12 process workshops across the business.
After mapping the employee journeys, we then utilised further Service Design tools, mapping a Service Delivery Blueprint where we examined all the employee journeys and combined the output to provide a big picture that outlined all the connecting workstreams.
We delved deep into department comparisons, identifying strengths in each department and what they could learn from each other. This helped us to not only understand the insights per department, but the cross-cutting insights, which we then grouped by themes that included our recommendations.
Recommendations were then grouped into opportunities, aligned with the change pillars and we took these into a Deep Dive Workshop with the stakeholders to prioritise them for the business.
We rounded off the project with a large-scale event named the Festival of Ideas, which re-engaged the employee base and energised them to action these opportunities. We looked at key trends and themes that had emerged from the As Is Analysis, Best in Class and Competitor Review, and Trends Analysis. We brought in an expert panel to kick off the event and discuss these trends in relation to the market too.
Seeing our clients walk away from these projects with not only thorough and accurate data on their current Employee Experience, but also a detailed map of the actions they need to take to make improvements, really validated my conviction that culture is no longer based on a feeling – a finger in the air and some inspirational words sprayed on a wall. An unplanned output of how a business operated.
Instead, successful People teams have become creatives, utilising the tools of the creative practices to conduct proper research and analysis, challenging assumptions and the status quo, and ultimately co-designing and innovating an employee experience that drives the culture the business wants to be known for.
Author: Avalyn Kasahara, Head of People at FSC
Avalyn has over a decade’s experience in employee culture, with a focus on learning and development. She has worked for both large corporates and creative agencies, and oversees the creation and culture of FSC’s unique club of members in her current role as Head of People.