How our clients are shaping their Employee Experience…

As we adapt to a new way of working, it’s never been more important for companies to understand the needs of their employees and define a clear Employee Experience strategy.

Here are some recent examples of how we have worked with our clients to help them understand more about the experience of their employees and how they’ve used the insights.

Professional services provider: Creating the ‘workplace of the future’

Our UX team’s always up for a challenge. So when a leading multinational professional services client talked to us about a failing e-learning product, we jumped in with both feet. “Sure, we’ll create a web native, Android and iOS compatible mobile app that addresses your issues!” we said.

The client’s e-learning app formed part of its efforts to move towards the concept of the ‘workplace of the future’. Essentially, this involved creating the infrastructure and culture to support flexible working – encompassing a wide variety of working environments and contexts (at home; while travelling; at third party premises; in hot desking areas; using standing desks; etc).

The client’s e-learning app was designed to assist its employees in setting-up and/or optimising their work areas. The problem was that it just wasn’t achieving employee buy-in: take-up was a lowly 20%. Hardly surprising perhaps, when the consensus was that the app was outdated and unengaging for users.

We started by developing prototypes to demonstrate our proposed designs, and proposed the look and feel of the app. Rather than a formalised/mandatory approach, we sought to create a complementary solution that users would warm to – an easily accessible quick reference guide that they would find genuinely useful.

Naturally, we placed a lot of emphasis on testing the app with users. We ran testing sessions and produced a full UX report that was presented back to the developers. After fine-tuning some of the language/terminology and calls to action, we were ready to present it to our client.

The client is currently completing final security testing on the app, before it is made available to employees via their corporate app store. It’s important to drive adoption with a proactive approach, and we will be assisting the client with communications campaign ideas to help maximise take-up.

We’re now preparing to launch a generic, System Concepts branded version of the app for employees everywhere, as well as looking at offering a wider suite of health and safety e-learning solutions.

BBC: Identifying employee user types

The goal was to understand how the BBC’s 35,000 employees collaborate, co-ordinate and communicate, then distil these findings down into usable, visual deliverables.

This research involved exploring the needs, behaviours and environmental factors experienced by the BBC workforce. We knew that the user types research would generate a lot of data, so from the outset we saw creative data visualisation as key to communicating insights effectively.

Through our creative data visualisation, user types and maps enabled the BBC Enterprise Systems IT team to rethink the use cases in particular business areas.

Dr Karen Yunqiu Li of the BBC says, “We used it as a conversational piece to show people the starting point of multiple use cases, that they can build on top of the modes of working.”

Technology provider: Understanding the ‘tech in the workplace’ experience

Our client wanted to understand how their 15,000+ employees worked and how they interacted with their Technology department. A key focus was to understand the objectives of management and their perceptions of employee needs, and how these compared with the real working practices and needs of their employees.

There was a widespread working from home culture within the organisation, which meant that they wanted to fully understand what worked well, any barriers to productivity and areas for improvement. Their staff were also based throughout Europe, meaning that collaboration was a core area of interest, and the technology used to do so.

Through 4 project stages, involving stakeholder workshops, user interviews and online surveys, we produced highly visual personas illustrating the key user groups within their workforce, and importantly, where similarities and differences lay, irrespective of job role.

The client was able to use the persona visuals to support new ways of working within the organisation, particularly around the technology used and streamlining processes across employee groups.

Financial services provider: Understanding how staff collaborate through technology

The goal of this research was to inform, at a strategic level, decisions around technology used within the organisation.

Our client recognised that in order to attract talent and facilitate diversity in their workplace, they needed to be a human centred organisation. That is, an organisation that not only considers the users of their products and services but also their employees, their families and the wider community. The main focus on meetings stemmed from a number of insufficiencies felt by a range of employees, where setting up meetings was felt to be a time consuming and sometimes difficult process.

We worked closely with our client to create a range of infographics to communicate the aim of the research, and need for change, to the wider business and stakeholders. We then ran a series of business objectives workshops to unpick existing issues and carried out user needs interviews with employees to test new ideas and tech set-up.

In an interactive debrief with the team, we were able to communicate clear benefits associated with the new proposed tech set-up, as well as a range of areas they should discuss with their suppliers prior to purchase. Since the test sessions mirrored real life experiences, the client felt confident moving forward to make large scale purchasing decisions, and that the new implementation would have a positive effect on their employees’ levels of satisfaction.