As HR organizations fight to keep up with rapidly shifting demands resulting from external forces (financial and labor market conditions, socio-political headwinds) and internal pressures (managing RIFs, HR staffing reductions, advanced technology adoption), making a continuing impact on the business is becoming a steeper hill to climb. These bring the prioritization of strategies and opportunities into play, as tighter resourcing forces CHROs and CPOs to choose what to build and upgrade while continuing daily operations that “keep the lights on.” One highly effective approach returns the function to basics, focusing on the needs of employees, managers, and leadership through HR design thinking.

HR design thinking is an innovation methodology derived from industrial design methods that academic and industry thought leaders have actively promoted as a uniquely powerful approach for generating cross-functional improvements anchored in human-centered design principles. It represents an approach that focuses on engaging with and empathizing with the end users of policies, processes, programs, practices, and platforms, and on developing solutions to the issues and frustrations they experience when working with them. It is designed as a structured methodology that balances user preferences with technical and business feasibility.

Originally expanded and adapted for business process design applications by IDEO (the Silicon Valley designer of the computer mouse), design thinking leverages the Human-Centered Design (HCD) philosophy, which holds that empathy for human needs best drives the development of solutions that meet people’s basic needs and improve their lives. HR design thinking operationalizes this as an iterative, structured methodology that guides teams through problem-solving, focusing on simplifying how employees conduct and complete work or administrative tasks. It is also used to address and improve interactions with people, systems, and the physical infrastructure, making them more efficient and effective. 

At its core, HR design thinking follows a process with three primary elements, all of which involve: 

1. Engaging directly with employees to find solutions to points of friction in their daily worklives
2. Understanding their social, emotional, and physical needs relative to a work policy, process, program, system, or environment.
3. Using a rapid, iterative, and experimental approach to solution generation, development, testing, and refinement.
   
   

How and why HR design thinking makes so much sense

The application of design thinking approaches has been demonstrated to generate substantially higher business and talent outcomes for companies that have adopted them as a solution set. For example, consider research findings that demonstrate its value as a driver of business and talent impact. 

IBM and Forrester reported that companies applying design thinking achieved 340% ROI on their projects, savings of over $30M, and a 50% reduction in product defects over a three-year period. Similarly, McKinsey research reported total returns to shareholders (TRS) of 56% over a five-year period and 32% higher revenue growth when design thinking was applied.

And HR design thinking directly drives improvements in the employee experience (EX), which in turn has been demonstrated to significantly impact:

• Revenue growth
• Profitability
• Customer satisfaction
• Innovation
• Productivity and performance

And on the talent outcomes side, it is proven to substantially improve:

• Employee engagement 
• Candidate attraction and recruiting/EVP
• Organizational culture
• Worker well-being
• Employee retention

Less tangible, but high-value operational benefits are generated through the core elements of HR design thinking by:

• Including employees in the process of fixing their own issues (raises engagement)
• Using HR leaders and staff as project sponsors, managers, and team members (gain expertise in business-aligned process refinement skills)
• Leveraging process and outcome metrics and analytic methods (broadens a data-centric culture)
• Spreading the word and championing end-user focus and engagement across the business (reinforces a culture of customer and partner engagement).
  
  

Understanding improvement targets for HR design thinking

The practical applications of design thinking in HR span every aspect of an employee’s “journey”, from job candidate to alumnus. Organizations often start with HR processes that generate the most complaints (e.g., the performance management cycle) or are presumed to pose the greatest barriers to critical talent outcomes (e.g., retention, engagement). Those are useful, but HR design thinking takes a more objective approach to identifying the highest-priority opportunities, as described in the next section. 

HR design thinking is best deployed as part of a business-aligned strategy that emphasizes continuous improvement, with priorities set based on their potential to impact specified business or operational objectives. Its purpose should be explicitly stated as a formal, structured process to understand how employees (including managers and leaders) can most productively and effectively complete their task(s) in ways that simplify their worklives. That means efficiently and effectively fulfilling their process roles and responsibilities, optimizing their use of (and gaining the full value from) associated systems, and supporting their aspirations (for assimilating, learning, mobility, advancement).

Common targets for problem-solving and solution development that leverage HR design thinking include experiences and processes, with an overarching focus on:

Employee Experience (EX)

Improving how employees experience key moments in the workplace while interacting with the organization, including workflows, administrative processes, structured and unstructured interpersonal activities, and enabling technologies.

Process streamlining

Driving HR process improvement by simplifying and removing unnecessary barriers to the access-input-approval-output process flows associated with HR and talent-related transactions, support inquiries, information retrieval, activity processing steps, and interactive communications and exchanges.

Employee productivity

Increasing the utility or usefulness of a product, process, program, or service by making it easier, faster, and more intuitive and logical for the end-users to use. This targets the time, effort, and ease with which employees can access, conduct steps, complete, and generate the planned value and outcomes they were designed to achieve. 

HR design thinking is deployed on a project, “sprint”, or initiative-based approach to identifying and addressing issues that impact the quality of employees’ worklives. As such, these efforts can focus on any aspect of the employee journey, targeting potential trouble spots related to how policies, processes, practices, programs, or technologies are designed and executed, including:

• Company culture
• Leadership and management practices
• Career development and advancement
• Work-life balance
• Employee recognition and rewards 
• Collaboration and teamwork
• Employee wellness and wellbeing 
• Technology and tools
• Physical workplace environment
  
  

The fundamental approach and steps of HR design thinking

HR design thinking is a human-centered, iterative, and nonlinear process that generates innovative, breakthrough solutions by applying core design principles of speed, agility, resourcefulness, objectivity, and creativity. While different processes are used, they all share a common core of steps: empathizing, discovering, ideating, prototyping, and testing.

The most critical and differentiating element in HR design thinking lies in the reliance on understanding and eliciting input and feedback from the end user (employee) throughout the process. The overriding objective is to align human preferences with business objectives and the boundaries or guardrails that govern them. Six (6) essential steps to an HR design thinking effort include:

1. Identify the problem to be addressed 

What are we concerned about?

The initial step always clarifies the project or sprint's purpose, which guides the discovery and solution team throughout the process. And the makeup of that team is a critical consideration; it must always assemble a cross-functional group of experts who can bring a comprehensive set of unique perspectives to bear. HR will frequently identify the opportunity(s) based on a continuous level of curiosity and questioning to understand the extent to which an issue does or might exist. Identifying issues comes from a regular review of metrics and analyses related to topics such as:

• Notable decreases in production, productivity, or quality levels
• Increased absences, employee relations complaints
• Regrettable turnover (new hire, critical skills, managerial)
• Low or dropping levels of employee engagement
• Post-activity or cycle trends (annual reviews, merit, bonus, benefits enrollment, IDP development, career plan inputs)
• Process/program/practice/policy/platform trouble tickets, surveys, inquiries, and complaints
• Rework and corrections (data input errors, output completeness, or quality)
• Time spent in administrative work, management meetings 

A uniquely powerful tool is the employee journey map that outlines the key phases, elements, and experiences across the employment lifecycle. It creates a visual path or listing of the fundamental steps that most, if not all, employees go through, including processes like hiring, onboarding, development planning, performance assessment, mobility, advancement, total rewards, recognition, and departure. 

The journey map is a useful tool for identifying where employees encounter “friction” or barriers to the easy, efficient, and timely completion of work or administrative activities, which can cause dissatisfaction. As a secondary or follow-up search for “pain points” that lower engagement and increase frustration with their employer, focus groups (or surveys) of targeted employees are presented with the steps and asked for their feedback. When combined with data trends, a more targeted identification of potential trouble spots can be conducted.

2. Understand the end-user 

Who are we concerned about?

The fundamental characteristic of HR design thinking is a reliance and focus on human perceptions and experiences as a source of discovery and design. As such, a crucial step is to clearly define who potential improvements will most affect, which is the primary end-user of the process, program, practice, or platform. With dozens, hundreds, thousands, or even more employees participating in or using these, the most efficient approach is to categorize them into personas or end-user groupings based on common backgrounds, roles, skill sets, and similar uses and needs within the targeted process or program. 

The first step in creating personas is to analyze employee population data and find common threads around their general (high-level) demographic profiles—education, experience, age, gender, career field, technological expertise, work schedules and locations, etc. The key is to keep this sufficiently high-level to identify only 5-8 unique personas, enabling a deeper understanding of their capabilities, needs, and motivations related to the targeted processes. With this information, small representative groups of each persona grouping can be brought together in focus groups to generate deeper insights, such as:

• What are their key behaviors? Habits? Preferences? 
• What are they thinking, seeing, feeling, and doing when participating in the targeted activity or using the process or system?
• What motivates their behaviors? What frustrates them?
• How do they process information?
• What native skills and capabilities do they rely upon when interacting with this?
• How do they react to the information after processing it?
• What “pain points” or frustrations have they identified as particularly bothersome?

When reviewing standardized processes and systems that are particularly troublesome, expert observations of how they use existing tools & processes in actual practice can augment this data collection.

With these insights in hand, formal descriptions can be documented in a standardized template and will be heavily relied upon as improvement design options are ideated and drafted.

3. Target the improvement opportunities

Where does the friction exist?

The next step is for the project or sprint team to dig deeper into each persona's identified pain points to identify those that have the greatest impact (positive or negative) on their overall work and work-life perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors. Referred to as “moments that matter” (MTMs), they are the steps or phases of the experience that, due to their design, create frustration, confusion, uncertainty, or errors that make processing inefficient and output faulty or incomplete. 

This process starts with the project team creating a detailed process map of the step-by-step flow of activities (e.g., employee logs onto the company intranet, searches for the internal job posting web app, selects the icon, enters job title search terms…). Once created, it can be shared with persona groups in a live focus group or brief survey to identify the steps that are particularly difficult or challenging for them to find and complete easily and within a reasonable amount of time. Those MTMs are compared and contrasted across persona groups, and identified (and prioritized) as targets for improvement.

The team then analyzes those to identify the root cause(s) of the problems employees report. This is an essential step, as HR design thinking relies on objective, rather than perceived reasons of why things are a problem. Root cause analysis is conducted using popular process improvement techniques that range from qualitative to quantitative methods, such as Fishbone Diagrams, “Five Whys”, or Pareto Analysis techniques.

4. Imagine the possibilities

How can we improve the experience?

This step draws on data, analysis, user feedback, and the project team's knowledge, expertise, resourcefulness, and creativity to begin developing potential solutions that directly address employee concerns and frustrations. HR design thinking often refers to this step as “ideation”, in which as many possible solutions are generated and then evaluated by the team.

A key element is to use techniques that separate people from their inherent biases about the “perfect solution”, which may be based on “what worked (or did not work) in a previous attempt or organization”, “is not feasible or affordable”, or “would never be approved”. The reason is related to the rationale for having cross-functional expertise on the project or sprint team—a variety of perspectives, technical expertise, and experiences that together can create a stronger, more likely-to-succeed solution.

A solid start is to conduct external research on benchmarks, innovative ideas, concepts, and best-practice thinking from academic, professional, or industry sources. Insights generated from those can be used to educate team members and amplify their creative thinking and problem-solving. Next, team brainstorming techniques are most frequently used to generate a mix of traditional and out-of-the-box solutions (click here for some great insights and methods from the Interaction Design Foundation). Finally, crowdsourcing of potential solutions with either the employee base (as a contest or engagement vehicle) or a select group of external professionals. 

Once the ideation has been completed, a list of summarized opportunities and hypothesized corrections or improvements should be captured, and then evaluated by the team based upon a set of agreed-upon criteria, selected from a set of options (cost, level of effort, time to implement, difficulty or level of skill required, technical viability, and projected effectiveness (relative to the personas’ pain points)).

5. Develop and test potential solution(s)

How can we quickly design and test potential solutions?

This phase is critical because it represents the third fundamental characteristic of HR design thinking: using a rapid, iterative, and experimental approach to solution generation, development, testing, and refinement. The team's concept is to quickly identify a “fix” that can be tested with small employee groups to gauge how well it addresses their pain points before investing in costly, time-consuming final design and development efforts that do not solve the identified problem or root cause. That, in turn, points to the need to develop a prototype of the solution so that end-users have something to react to. Prototypes are inexpensive mock-ups of the solution—a streamlined process map, a storyboard, a technology wireframe, or an interactive model or simulation. 

These should be developed and presented to a group of targeted employees (i.e., from the persona groups) for feedback and discussion. The idea is to simply ask them a series of questions, such as “If we did this, how much better would this be?” “What would you change?”, and/or “How can we adjust or replace it to improve your experience?” Once the feedback is received, the team processes it and begins iterating by refining the prototype into a more advanced version that addresses the feedback. This feedback-and-refine process can run through multiple cycles, depending on the solution's complexity.

In parallel with the end-user testing and iteration process, the solution should be reviewed with technical experts and the appropriate level of management to continuously assess its value proposition, technical viability, potential costs and effort, change management requirements, and suitability relative to corporate values and business objectives.

6. Implement the solution

Once the design is solidified, it is developed and (as appropriate or needed) pilot tested in selected parts of the organization. During that pilot, process and outcome measures should be developed to track and evaluate the effectiveness and extent to which hypothesized gains are achieved. Measures or KPIs should capture elements such as ease of locating and accessing, time spent in the activity, level of effort required, and the utility or effectiveness of the activity and output. Evaluate each element with end-user post-process surveys, embedded process or technology data, and feedback on planned outcomes from employees, their managers, and process or program owners or administrators. 

When the targeted solution is ready for full implementation, comprehensive change management strategies should be put in place to raise awareness of the change, educate employees, and provide training and support during the rollout—all to achieve full acceptance and adoption of the changes.

A series of post-implementation “reflection” sessions can offer further opportunities for iteration and refinement, especially after one or more cycles of major activity have been completed, to review design elements, process flows, end-user behavior, and feedback. With these, HR design thinking can be integrated into leaders' and employees' expectations and assimilated into an HR culture of employee-centric policy, processes, practices, programs, and technology excellence and continuous improvement.

Relevant Practices & Tools

Core Lean HR Practices to Align HR with Business Strategies and Objectives. >

“Lean” practices represent a methodology designed to impact the entire business system, from defining value in the most differentiating ways to empowering employees to redesign how they accomplish their work to improve productivity and engagement... more »

Using Human-Centered Design to Build Employee and Customer-Focused Innovation Initiatives. >

Human-centered design is an approach to innovation that grounds any initiative (service, program, or product) in real human needs by engaging the end-users in the design process... more »

Identifying Potential Lean Applications Best Suited to Core HR Practices. >

Stepping back to identify and select core HR processes and practices to target represents a key starting point in generating early “wins” that establish credibility for HR as a legitimate Lean player... more »

Leveraging Design Thinking and Rapid Prototyping for Fast, More Employee-centered, and Responsive Learning and Development. >

Design Thinking and the Human-centered Design (HCD) methodology represent “an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding”... more »

The PDCA Cycle Template: Conduct Structured HR Experimentation Using the Plan–Do–Check–Adjust Cycle to Test and Learn from Real Outcomes. >

The PDCA Cycle Template provides a practical framework for testing and refining HR process improvements through small, time-bound experiments... more »