Designing the workforce and workplace experience

We’re all becoming used to services that are more personalised, proactive, real-time and rewarding because we experience these qualities every day when encountering leading brands in retail, hospitality, travel and banking, for instance. We’ve come to expect our interactions to be seamlessly joined-up across all of the touchpoints, whether online or instore, in person or assisted by AI.

As the lines between work and private life blur, this heightened expectation has transitioned into the workplace and keeping up with what employees see as reasonable benchmarks and ahead of emerging trends is a universal challenge.

There’s more and more media commentary about the ‘best companies to work for’, employees are looking for more than just compensation and benefits and want their careers to be part of a wider, richer life experience. As more and more companies focus on customer experience, so their staff become more attuned to what’s possible and what good looks like.

Customer experience is well-established as a competitive battleground. Now, employee experience is coming to the fore in the battle to attract and retain a globally-mobile and demanding workforce.

More mature organisations, that have realised the value of designing more remarkable and compelling customer experiences, are also applying design-led approaches to improve their colleague experiences, interdepartmental services and business processes. For them, this is becoming the way they solve some of the most important challenges their businesses face.

For others, the journey is just beginning, with an increasing number of organisations looking for ways to better connect with their customers and employees, not as a nice to have, but as the driver of commercial advantage.

Our experience of designing colleague and workplace experiences spans a variety of sectors and sizes of organisation. Some of our work has been specifically about how we’ve helped organisations design better employee experiences for their own staff in automotive, financial services and talent mobility. Others explore another interesting angle, that of B2B2Employee where the experiences we’ve designed have enabled our clients to deliver an improved experience for their B2B customers’ workforces in hospitality, infrastructure and pension provision.

In short, as a methodology, mindset and set of tools, Service Design provides an approach that’s effective for designing better experiences for everyone.