In the global conference of service design network, held in Madrid last week, theme was service design at scale. Why was employee experience one of the topics that rise into discussions for the first time at this scale? Is employee experience the same as wellbeing of employees?

Service design is known to be really good in problem solving: creating services, that answer the customer´s unmet need.  But characteristic to this era is that all organizations struggle with large scale implementation especially in non-digital services. Number one reason why change initiative fails is employee resistance and management behavior. In service design terms, delivery phase, but more commonly known as implementation, is the phase, where the recognized reason for failing is the lack of employee adaptation. One answer to this is working with employee experience (EX), which brings service design from strategic level work to practice and explores the topic from the employee, but also from the business side as well.

Continuous change, fast pace of technology development, new tools, channels and methods has led to a situation where employees are really struggling with their workload and are feeling overwhelmed. They are drowning in the amount emails and information coming and are often stuck in ineffective meetings. More and more is added, but are the existing processes and working methods supporting the wanted need?

Slide by Carla Rocha Mohairs , Businers, to point out the the different wants that affects on the employee experience

Designing employee experience can tackle the challenges. It means organizations need to shift their focus on understanding employees´ needs and start designing concepts and solutions from this perspective. If you are now thinking free beer and candy bars, I want to high light that EX investigates it from a far wider perspective: What are your people thinking? What do they say to you? How do they feel? What do they actually do? After understanding the reality and their unmet needs, we should be thinking how can we relief our employees work? As I wrote in my previous post, integrating systems and channels and designing something the future can design further are definitively aspects to consider together with the development of culture and way of working.