Tag Archive | employee experience

Designing remote working practices to improve employee experience (EX) in organizations

Oct9

In recent years, remote working has become a hot topic as organizations are developing new working processes and modern collaborative platforms and technology emerge. At the same time, firms are moving towards human-centric approaches and working in multidisciplinary teams to stay competitive. Due to these rapid changes in several industries, recruitment, finding right competences and retaining well-performing employees has become crucial. 

With this in context, two Service Design students, Nora Ryti and Jenny Kurjenniemi at Laurea, University of Applied Sciences, arranged two online workshops. Their intention was to research how employee experience can be improved to retain talent. They we’re looking to include findings from this workshop (combined with e.g. qualitative data from interviews) in their Master’s Theses, that focuses on the following topics: 

  • What are the characteristics and trends in knowledge work? 
  • What skills, practices and tools are needed in remote knowledge work? 
  • What are the needs of a knowledge worker? 
  • What is the role of employee experience in employer branding? 

I attended one of the workshops and explain how it proceeded in this blog post. This workshop, arranged mainly on two platforms, Microsoft Teams for communication and Miro as a visual collaborative tool, was completely online. To ensure that all involved participants had equal opportunities to join, technical aspects were considered and all participants were sent guidelines on how to set up necessary tools prior to joining the session. 

The selected group of participants, consisting of ~10 individuals, was diverse, involving knowledge workers of different ages, locations and industries. Most cameras were turned on and it felt inspiring meeting strangers, knowing that you’d soon know much more about them and their views. 

To complete tasks in co-creation, Microsoft Teams worked as a channel for communication. Both chat and audio were activated all time, and groups were set into separate calls to deepen discussion in certain assignments.  

Miro was used as a collaborative tool, where most tasks were completed on a digital whiteboard. Access was granted through a shared link and no signup was required.  

Miro was used as a tool for collaboration
Miro was used as a tool for collaboration. Screen capture from workshop.

Workshop agenda

The workshop had a well-outlined agenda including breaks and different tasks (explained in detail below). In the beginning of the session, thorough information was shared on what to expect and strictly stating that no data was going to be shared outside of the research, thus leaving participants anonymous.  

Below the assignments chronological order: 

  • Introduction round (warmup exercise) 
    • To get to know all participants, participants answered a few simple questions:  Who are you, what do you do, how has your day been and what animal would you be? 
       
  • Task 1: Express your feeling towards remote working with one emoji 
    • This resulted in a visualized canvas with various emoticons in different sizes and shapes. This task was a suitable introduction to Miro and activated all participants. 
       
  • Task 2: Insert an image explaining what you miss during remote work 
    • A set of images were copied from the internet and explained what attendees miss the most in remote work. The canvas resembled a mood board.  

Divergence 
Through a canvas produced by the facilitators (based on a previous workshop), discussions were held in different areas related to remote working such as leadership, tools, ergonomics and collaboration.

  • Task 3: Add sticky notes with ideas/concepts that constitute to a good remote working experience
    • Participants were given the task to add as many ideas as possible, by placing one idea per sticky note grouped on the whiteboard.
  • Task 4: Produce more ideas!
    • After a small break and individual analysis of what was on the board, more ideas were produced.

Convergence
To combine, structure and analyze all produced ideas, participants were divided into two groups for further discussion. 

  • Task 5: Discuss, document and prioritize three main areas (per category)
    • Separate Microsoft Teams channels were created to give focus in group discussions. In the end of this session, ideas were condensed into three main topics that were explained briefly to the rest of the group including comments.

In the end of the session, ideas were converged into three main themes.
Screen capture from workshop.

Conclusions  

Although a three-hour workshop was quite intensive after a long day of work, there were many positive aspects. Firstly, Miro as a collaborative tool seemed useful, easy to grasp and I might utilize a similar tool in future workshops myself. 

Participants were open for discussion and I believe everyone got their say. In online environments, it’s crucial that the one in a facilitator role ensure that all attendees are active. It is, although, also important to give room for silence – especially as you do not see what participants are thinking. A few second of silence can potentially constitute to great reflection and new ideas.  

Overall, when arranging digital workshops, a culture of openness, respect and honesty needs to be embraced to fully utilize its’ potential and to get things done. 

Written by Thomas Djupsjö 
MBA Student at Laurea, University of Applied Sciences 

Resources 

Brown, T., 2008, “Design Thinking”. Harvard Business Review, p. 84-92

Djupsjö, T., 2019, “Key issues and strategies for implementing the Lean Methodology in organizations “, Arcada, University of Applied Sciences 

Keller, S. & Meaney, M., 2017, “Attracting and retaining the right talent”, McKinsey & Company 
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/attracting-and-retaining-the-right-talent 

Küng, L., 2017, “Strategic Management in the Media – Theory to Practice”, 2nd Edition, SAGE Publications Ltd., London. 

Employee Experience at Tieto

Oct11

Tieto_employee_experience_1

I attended a talk about Tieto’s employee experience this week and it was very inspiring to learn how Tieto make use of Jacob Morgan’s thoughts on employee experience to strive to be the best on the market for both employees and external customers.

Jacob Morgan is the father of the Employee Experience Equation, which essentially means the combination of technology, physical space and culture that create the employee experience. Tieto have adopted this model to create their employee experience, something that plays a crucial role at Tieto to not only to hire and retain the best talent, but also as based on their own research, it directly translates to the customer experience.

This was very interesting to learn as even though the topic was employee experience, the customers were put at the heart of the service. Even though internal customers are just as important as the external ones, we often tend to design services with the external customers in mind first, but should not forget the impact an organisation’s internal customers (i.e. employees) have on the value that customers create.

The Employee Experience Equation in practice

As Morgan discusses, the employee experience boils down to 3 areas. At Tieto, these mean the following:

Technology

Having the best technology in use that makes working more efficient. When new technology is being considered, the employees are interviewed to increase buy-in. Data privacy and security also plays a big role as Tieto employees are experts in this, the same standard is required from the technology choices.

Physical space

Tieto_employee_experience_3

One of the best-known examples of the physical space within the employee experience at Tieto is the Empathic Building which can be experienced in the Keilaniemi offices. The Empathic Building allows a completely new way of interacting with your colleagues from finding their location based on tags they wear (all voluntary so if an employee feels like they don’t want to be tracked, they don’t have to) to seeing which rooms and desks are free. But the physical space is a lot more, there are a variety of spaces employees can choose from depending on what their day looks like (from quiet spaces to group working areas or even areas meant just for relaxing). There is also an in-house Support Centre where anyone can get help with their IT or healthcare, which is one of the key areas that Tieto employees feel is important.

Culture

Tieto_employee_experience_2

With over 15,000 employees globally, creating a culture of inclusion has been very important. The aim of Tieto culture is for everyone to feel included, valued, respected and heard which is achieved by celebrating diversity and bringing employees from different locations together, either digitally or physically. There are, for example, several Tieto Communities where likeminded people can network within the company and learn from each other.

 
Tieto are continuously investing in their employee experience and it was great to hear how they have utilised the Employee Experience Equation. If you ever get the chance to visit the Tieto offices, I can warmly recommend them as it serves as a nice inspiration for what employee experience can look like.

Employee experience – same same, but different?

Nov8

 

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?

 

EX_1

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.