A first, critical step in the process of rethinking the employee experience is for leaders to learn what their people truly need. While we all know how important it is to be data driven, according to Slack’s future forum report, 66% of executives reported that they’re designing their post-pandemic workforce policies with little to no input from their employees. The result is that many organizations are rolling out “one-size-fits-none” policies and approaches at scale. Such data-less policy decisions are not the result of malice or disinterest but frequently come down to the time and resources required to collect and make sense of employee data. (And no, a quick survey asking how many days a week your employees want to work from home won’t cut it.)
Leaders need tools that allow them to efficiently, effectively, and rigorously learn what their diverse group of employees actually needs so that they can craft policies accordingly. The good news is that organizations have been tackling a similar data-collection and interpretation challenge for years when it comes to understanding the differentiated needs of their clients.
For the past 10 years, in our respective work (Marilyn’s as a consultant and Mark’s as a researcher, scholar, and advisor), we’ve been applying techniques typically used to understand users and customers to the design of employee experiences. By turning these techniques inward, we’ve helped many organizations gain a nuanced understanding of their employees’ needs and preferences in an efficient and cost-effective manner — understanding they’ve used to craft better-fitting and more sustainable employee experiences.
Here, we’ll share a selection of these tools, illustrated with examples taken from the case of “ComCo”: a global communications agency that asked Marilyn’s firm to help rethink the design of their regional offices as part of their “Workplace for the Future” initiative. The group at ComCo included the company’s managing director, president, head of HR, creative director, head of operations, head of finance, and global CTO. Here’s how one leader framed the challenge:
When it was time to refurbish our office, we knew the task ahead would mean more than updating a floor plan. We had the opportunity to truly rethink the way we work and how our workplace enables that. Our goal was a space that aligns with our business strategy and plans for growth, but also matches the needs of our employees. Lacking the time, resources, and tools to do this efficiently and diligently ourselves, we called in Marilyn’s team to help us capture, quantify, and make sense of the relevant data. This facilitated our decision making and ensured we designed spaces and policies that remained employee-centric.
Step 1: Collecting data
It’s undeniable that we all have preconceived notions and expectations that bias our thinking. The antidote to bias is data, so before designing any policy, the critical first step is collecting data. In ComCo, Marilyn’s firm collected this data through a combination of four distinct tools intentionally applied in sequence. As Marilyn recounts it:
Tool 1: Auditing archival data
We kicked off our discovery phase with ComCo by collecting documents, policies, and internal comms related to new ways of working. We discovered that the company’s flexible work policies had not been formalized, save for a two-page checklist on remote-work tips that was issued during the pandemic. As a result, we recognized (and the client agreed) that the scope of the project had to be reframed to include work policy design, process development, and workforce upskilling. The result was a far more coherent, integrated result.
Archival data provides an unbiased overview of the organization. The idea is to review existing artifacts and documentation and extract insights and opportunities. Common sources include software and tools (e.g., HR and ERP, employee engagement platforms, etc.), internal and external communications, and documentation archives. Start here to get the lay of the land and spark your thinking. Importantly, this method makes no additional demands of employees.
Tool 2: Interviews
At the beginning of our mission, we were told that offices were a heated topic of debate among leaders at ComCo. Some strongly expressed the need for a private office. Others believed their colleagues were overly attached to offices as status symbols. Through in-depth interviews, we came to realize that the leaders demanding a private office often wanted it as a space to coach teams, have confidential conversations, and simply to offer it up to their teams as a space to convene and collaborate. Status never came up. These one-on-one, “off-the-record” interviews allowed leaders to be candid and open about their views and us to get to the bottom of the issue and make a relevant floor-plan recommendation.
Interviews are particularly powerful at early stages when you’re still learning what the key issues are, especially for sensitive topics where certain responses are considered “correct.” They allow you to get a sense of the stories behind the quantitative data you’ll collect later. The idea is to have semi-structured conversations with employees to gather their perspectives, interpretations, and ideas. We use a guide to promote consistency in data, but we’re willing to diverge from it to follow an interesting idea. We also ensure a diverse sample across groups, hierarchy, geography, demography, etc., and pay attention to both the supporters and detractors.
Tool 3: Day-in-the-life observations
Toward the later stages of our discovery phase at ComCo, we organized a full-day visit during which we observed how employees went about their days at the office. Many of the private offices were unoccupied as leaders traveled or attended external meetings. In contrast, meeting rooms were overbooked. Although we had been told that the noise level could be disruptive, we found the offices to be quiet compared to other companies in the same industry. We also came away with observations of team rituals, quirky desk setups, community snack stashes, a victory bell reserved for celebrating successful pitches, and other elements of the office life that didn’t come up in the 25 interviews we had conducted. This informed our recommendation for community spaces that teams could use to continue hosting their favorite activities and rituals.
Observing an employee through a portion of their day and noticing behaviors, and habits shows us what employees actually do — not what they say they do — including actions they might be unaware of. We typically use this to validate what we were told during interviews. Tempting as it is to ask lots of questions, try to intervene as little as possible. Take pictures to trigger your recollections. Just make sure to ask for permission first. Later, you can conduct interviews to ask about specific observations.
Tool 4: Surveys
It was through our survey at ComCo that we discovered a major discrepancy between leaders’ and employees’ visions for their future office. Employees’ responses indicated that they spent 70% of their time on individual work — in fact, they identified individual work as one of their top three reasons for coming to the office. This conflicted with the collaborative office space leadership was looking to design. Backed by these concrete numbers, we increased the share of space dedicated to individual work in the new layout.
Surveys are particularly effective at validating the stories and insights you gathered using qualitative tools. Run them after you’ve formulated hypotheses that you need to test out to inform key decisions, or repetitively over time to capture trends in the data. It’s important to ensure the statistical significance of your data (you can use a calculator to do that). Finally, remember that your questions are signals: If you ask about something, you might have to implement it.
A final note on data collection: Remember that when collecting any data, you may come across something your subject doesn’t want shared publicly. Both for ethical reasons and to ensure valid data, it’s critical that your subjects’ privacy is respected (and that they know it). We explain this before any data-collection effort and make sure subjects know they have the right to stop at any point.
Step 2: Interpreting the data
While collecting data on employees’ experiences and needs is a critical first step, it’s equally important to have a structured approach to analyzing that data. Having a clear analysis approach maximizes objectivity and efficiency. The following three tools can help your organization quickly and effectively make sense of what you’ve learned:
Tool 1: Saturating and grouping
In our discovery phase with ComCo, we collected more than 3,280 survey question answers, 30 archival documents, 120 pages of transcripts from 25 interviews, hundreds of images of the space, and dozens of global reports, case studies, and benchmarks.
We got the team together, laid out all of our findings, insights, and data points (we used Post-it notes), and went through a cycle of grouping and regrouping into the most exhaustive yet pared-down set of core themes we could. In a single grouping session, we were able to reduce all of this data to four key questions (and related data) for leadership to address:
- What specific activities should the office enable (individual work, collaboration, socializing, client interactions, etc.), and in what ratios?
- How do we want to represent our multiple company brands in the physical space?
- What changes will we make to our HR work policies and L&D strategies to enable our new work model?
- How will we manage the transition phase to ensure that all employees and leaders are on board?
Saturation and grouping is best done as a group activity at the end of your discovery phase, using all the data from surveys, interviews, observations, and other sources. Keep an eye out for similar (or contradictory) insights coming from different data-collection methods. Use saturating and grouping to extract meaningful insights and opportunities and highlight key themes to be addressed.
Tool 2: User personas
User personas are fictional characters, based on research and data, that are used to represent a group of users and express their major pain points and needs in relation to your focus area. Leadership at ComCo was operating under the reasonable assumption that working parents wanted more WFH time to facilitate parenting logistics. But our user personas showed us that there was a second, distinct group of parents: those living in multigenerational households, who had built-in child care support but desperately needed a dedicated quiet space to do their work. This led us to argue for an even higher ratio of individual workspaces, including for functions that could theoretically be done remotely, such as customer service.
User personas help you understand the full set of a person’s interconnected needs. They’re particularly effective when your employees fall into a number of distinct groups. The more real a persona feels to you — in other words, the more you can imagine what that person would say or how they would act — the easier it is to empathize with them, understand them, and design for their needs.
Tool 3: Touchpoint mapping
Touchpoints are an employee’s multiple contact points with the organization. They take many forms — human, physical, virtual, formal, and informal — and include many that the organization doesn’t “control,” such as group chats on external services like Whatsapp or reviews on sites like Glassdoor. Touchpoint mapping allows you to get a holistic, visual representation of an employee’s multiple contact points with the organization.
The goal is to 1) make sense of how different parts of the system affect one another to yield an employee’s final experience, and 2) ensure you don’t limit the scope of your work too aggressively by ignoring touchpoints that might have a strong impact on the employee experience you’re trying to improve.
We mapped all of the employee touchpoints of ComCo and evaluated how they supported (or didn’t support) a more flexible work model:
- Office
- Intranet
- Managers
- Internal comms
- Company events
- Policies
- Technology (hardware and software)
We found a clear conflict between the messages employees were receiving from the official policy (“we’re embracing flexible work”) and their managers’ actions (for example, mandates to return to the office). This conflict led to confusion on the part of employees and led us to incorporate leadership training into the scope of the project.
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These tools make the process of designing employee experiences more efficient, iterative, and likely to yield a final product that addresses the needs of both your employees and organization. Each one emphasizes something different (interpretation, quantification, objectivity) and has different time and resource requirements. For example, archival data and observations place few demands on the organization in terms of time and effort but give you minimal ability to steer topics, while surveys and interviews are the inverse. Similarly, different data-interpretation tools allow you to observe the problem from different angles (user personas focus on the employees; touchpoints focus on the channels). Think about your objectives and choose the set of tools accordingly.
In under six weeks, Marilyn’s firm helped ComCo address their office and work redesign challenge by using these tools in concert, leveraging their differing relative strengths to quickly and efficiently understand the diverse needs of the company’s entire employee population. The firm was able to design an appropriate work model and office value proposition, and ComCo leadership considered the project a huge success based on improved employee engagement. They now use it as a case study for how to engage in similar redesigns across the company’s global locations.