Summary
Organizations of all sizes often struggle to reap the full benefits of change, especially in times of transformation, despite huge investments in technology and process. This is often because employees don't understand how their role is changing. It may seem simple to just clarify roles and responsibilities, but as with consumer facing products, people are unique, complex, and motivated by factors that aren't always easy to discover. Additionally, designing for the employee can also mean designing for stakeholder buy-in. This is a story about a real world approach to building practical application of empathy across multiple disciplines and reporting lines, overcoming reservations, navigating politics, with the goal of building a lasting partnership where employee UX design/execution is a team sport and never outsourced.
Key Insights
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Scaling empathy is crucial for organizational success.
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Understanding the company's internal ecosystem is essential for implementing new processes or technologies.
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Focusing solely on technology without considering people can lead to project failures.
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Creating cross-functional teams can help bridge gaps between different departments.
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Empathy should extend beyond end-users to include all employees involved in a project.
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Advocacy networks facilitate better communication and understanding among teams.
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Projects should start by identifying how changes will impact all roles involved.
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Connecting empathy to strategic value can lead to more successful outcomes.
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It's important to present the value of projects before diving into the details of how they work.
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Encouraging a culture of discovery can stimulate innovation and collaboration.
Notable Quotes
"I'm really interested in designing now for the employee and how the systems inside of a company work together."
"There may be a really, really big common goal at the company level, but there are all these subcultures with their own drivers."
"I didn’t understand the ecosystem that such technology would live in, the culture it would live in."
"We had easily 24 different communities that would be impacted by these changes."
"If we release this new feature now, it won't make sense because other things aren’t in place."
"We had to figure out how do we export our empathy that we had found for our customers to those other teams making things in the same space."
"We started creating this environment for discovery."
"Let's first give you the value upfront. Make that cheap and easy."
"It might have slowed us a little bit on our roadmap, but it made it easier for our executive sponsor to say, yeah, it's okay to deviate."
"We think about customers as humans but forget that employees also have challenges and pressures."
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