A Design Thinking Perspective for Employee Engagement and Retention

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The other day, I was reading a blog on 2018 Employee Engagement/ Retention Statistics#1 and the following statements caught my attention:

  • Of the 5 billion people on the planet, only 1.4 billion have a good job and just 16% of those are engaged. (Gallup)
  • Among millennials who worked at 5-7 organizations, 34% didn’t trust their direct manager, 31% said their organizations don’t set goals, and 48% said their organization thought only about profits. (O.C. Tanner)
  • Distraction at work is a problem for 69% of full-time employees. (Udemy)
  • 60% of employees said that meetings are a source of distraction. (Udemy)
  • 55% of businesses think that stronger engagement would improve their ability to retain, recruit, or carry out succession planning. (CBI)
  • 44% of businesses think improved employee engagement would lead to them being better able to retain, whilst 36% think it would have a positive impact on recruitment. (CBI)

The ‘context’ and ‘content’ of these statements is nothing new to most Business and HR professionals. What may change occasionally is the intensity and reported numbers. There are several core questions that have plagued the employee engagement and retention space. From the work to the workspace, we have often asked:

What is a good job or job design?

  • What could foster a culture of trust and accountability?
  • What will unleash the best in employees and teams?
  • What would cause true retention?

Through surveys and post survey actions, we have all had some good answers and yet we seek to do enough to make a lasting difference in these areas. The Stanford d.school Design Thinking Process may provide key stimuli to the way we ask these questions and experiment implementing the answers. Today, discussions based on this model are known to many and need very little initiation. However, the need of the hour is to start applying the design thinking process to organization development in a way that creates sustainable engagement and retention.

In my coaching and therapy practice of over 10 years, I have seen practitioners, by virtue of training and also intuitively, apply some key aspects of this model. And mind it, for most of us, it didn’t come from d.school, however, the similarity of approach is a ratification of the key concepts in the context of understanding people and helping them perform.

All successful therapists and coaches know that the efficacy of their work draws from the following three aspects:

  • True Empathy to discover what makes or can make people tick in the given environment
    • This is similar to the Empathize – Define Spectrum of the Design Thinking model.
  • Deep discovery and ideation to map true performance improvement opportunities
    • This is similar to the Define – Ideate – Prototype Spectrum of the Design Thinking model.
  • Rapid testing to enable growth and change to unlock the true potential of each human being
    • This is similar to the Prototype – Test Spectrum of the Design Thinking model.

Similarly, design thinking has shown tremendous impact in everything from product design to customer retention. Drawing a quick inference from therapists, coaches, and design thinkers, the “5-step d.school design thinking model” is a proven way of getting results and solving real issues. Hence, it is a potent tool to now be applied to employee contexts and solving employee challenges. It is only when true employee challenges get resolved that engagement and retention will become sustainable.

Engagement and retention kick start from the time when an employee joins the organization. In everything from “hire loss” to “early exits” and “good employee leaving” to “disengaged employee staying back”, there is something that the organization doesn’t understand or is not doing right. Part of this has to do with cultural practices, work practices (systems and processes), and leadership practices.

  • There is enough and more chatter about the uniqueness of each individual.
    • How can this uniqueness be leveraged as a tool for engagement?
  • There is enough and more evidence that passion fuels success and powerful outcomes.
    • What are we doing to kindle passion at work?
  • There is enough and more data that proves that employee loyalty and happiness contribute to profitability.
    • What is ensuring that our employees are staying happily and are not leaving unhappily?

Let’s now look at how we can use the “d.school design thinking model” spectrum in the Business and HR context to ensure that our cultural, work, leadership practices result in employee engagement and retention.

The Empathy Stage…And several tools that are available can help us discover what our people really want. Every cohort of employees is unique. And instead of external benchmarking, empathizing the Design Thinking way will help leaders minimalize ‘imposing’ and maximize the ‘contextualise in’.

The questions to answer at this stage are:

  • Who needs to develop this understanding?
  • How deep are we going to go?
  • How are we going to stay at this stage long enough so that we completely map employee issues and experiences?

The rewards we receive here are:

  • Skill of enquiry
  • Availability of facts
  • Elimination of assumptions and generalizations
  • Barrier to copying or following the trend

The Define Stage…And the tools available will help us create a business reality aligned with the definition of our work, workplace and people realities (based on true empathy). This is the stage which must have deep listening and empathy preceding it so it can build a true description of the problem and opportunity.

The questions to answer at this stage are:

  • How will we prevent generalizations and data loss from previous stage?
  • How do we keep the definition rich enough and yet be able to move forward without getting lost in solving? (Remember, there is another stage for that.)
  • How will we prevent current beliefs and conditioning from contaminating what we are only learning to understand?

The rewards we receive here are:

  • Objective situational awareness based on facts gathers from the affected source
  • Immersion into the context rather than preoccupation with content and action bias
  • Simmering urgency and fuelling detailing of situation

The Ideate and Prototype Stage…Done as agile cycles can create a whole set of ideas to create breakthroughs for the system. It also helps minor real-life validation. Both, organisation and employees will be able to generate a pool of ideas for work-testing and details that will allow the ideas to work well.

The questions to answer at this stage are:

  • How can we prevent biases and filters from sabotaging ideation?
  • How can we record and detail everything rapidly to enable real time testing?
  • How can we bring back real knowledge from testing into ideation and prototyping to enhance quality of possible solutions?
  • How can we avoid fatigue in the system with excessive stimulation or too much action at this stage?
  • How can we condition the system to be habitual of doing this cycle to constantly maintain or engage the work and work environment?

The rewards we receive here are:

  • Evidence-based solution development for the organisation and people
  • Design validation in the true sense and not customisation
  • Engineering of culture and not reverse engineering of drivers

The Testing Stage…Is a validation of real life effectiveness, efficiency, and changes required to create and sustain our solutions for our people needs.

The questions to answer at this stage are:

  • How can we be observant enough to develop and choose the best solution for our defined problem?
  • How can we be agile and observant enough to find our faults and go back to the define/ideate/prototype stage to fix them?
  • Is our solution sustainable enough to stand through the upcoming changes in the organization?
  • How can we quickly move to another solution, if this one doesn’t work?
  • How can we simultaneously test 2 or 3 possible solutions?
  • How can we tighten our systems after we find the right solution?

The rewards we receive here are:

  • Real chances of solutions working and being acceptable to people
  • Impact can be traced back to design
  • No randomness in what is happening in the system

Removing the Reasons and Preventing the Seasons

In any people system, reasons and seasons both play a part. They trigger needs and can also trigger changes. Engagement and retention, or a lack of these, are also subject to reason and season. The season may not require being dealt with. But, the reasons should not be left ignored. Design thinking is a worthy approach that can embed the habit of finding and eliminating engagement and retention challenges is any people system. Once the reasons are resolved, even seasons would gradually stop impacting the positive state of things.

The social change phenomenon—tipping point—can be reached by using Design Thinking in the ‘people’ context. Therapists, coaches, and design thinkers all know that once things start ticking, results soon become a ‘hockey-stick’ phenomenon. Organizations need to acquire the same practices and behaviours, apply them, and create systems to sustain them. Only then can the problems of engagement and retention be solved sustainably.

“If you want to bring a fundamental change in people’s belief and behavior…you need to create a community around them, where those new beliefs can be practiced and expressed and nurtured.”

― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

#1 https://blog.accessperks.com/2018-employee-engagement-loyalty-statistics#1


Author-Sai Kumar Chandran is a change leader and an evangelist of personal & professional excellence, with over 20 years of multi-industry experience. He has been a business and HR leader with many large organizations and groups. Sai has been recognized for the impact that he brings through Thought Leadership, Strategic Orientation, and Execution Excellence. He is also recognized as a Performance Transformation Facilitator, Coach, and Consultant. He believes in simplification and intelligent use of technology to enhance productivity. Sai is a practicing Consultant, Coach, Facilitator, and Therapist to individuals and organizational clients in India and several other countries.

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