Abstract

Brands like Apple, Google, Nike, Amazon, and PepsiCo have been established because of practicing and using design thinking to create innovative products. For example, Nike is the best sports company because they have great technology and equipment to boost the performance of the athletes. In basketball shoes, Nike provides cushions and lightweight materials to accommodate the sport.  Design thinking indeed has led to the success of products design and to the operational processes. Innovation is synonymous with design thinking.

In this article, I want to present how design thinking is particularly relevant in the context of Human Resource practices. Quite recently, at Deloitte, the company developed Human Resources solutions that focus on creating a positive employee experience by using Design Thinking principles. These Human Resources solutions have built standard operating procedures (SOPs) and processes that put the employee experience in the centre and by doing so made it simple, gratifying, and fascinating. Deloitte incorporated design thinking elements through digital designs to experience work processes, behavioural economics, and much more. Traditional Human Resources solutions are built around process steps, forms, and formal training. Individual employees want to experience one on one information and interaction in the organization. The previous format of broadcasting information has been discarded and mails are sent to individual employees pertaining to their scope of work and scope to improvise the process.  

Deloitte used Design Thinking to convert Human Resources from a “process developer” to an “experience architect”. From redesigning the physical work environment to optimising the digital workspace and directing how managers use their time, Design Thinking has helped Deloitte reimagine the entire process of hiring, training, engaging, and evaluating employees. Deloitte has invested in their employees, studying how people behave at work to create profiles and personas to model their solutions on. These profiles are specific to the employee demographics, work environment, and the set of challenges they encounter. Ideating and prototyping have enabled the company to come up with quicker solutions and effective tools. Feedback mechanisms based on questionnaires have helped them bring specific requirements to light and facilitate learning and awareness. Few companies are even using agile methodologies to teach people to do less and focus more.

Design thinking is a multi-disciplinary tool. It is non-linear. In the Human Resources context, the principles of design thinking are applied to answer humanistic questions by assuming challenges faced by people and trying to make them easier. Each individual has a different approach to looking at a challenge in the organization; each individual has a different perception. 

Design thinking develops an in-depth understanding of people for whom solutions are being designed and involves them in the process so as to come up with out-of-the-box ideas to enhance their workplace experiences.  It seeks to integrate the skills and methodology of designers from multiple disciplines into a collaborative effort. Multidisciplinary designers need to understand how diverse areas of expertise can come together to solve complex design problems.

While brushing teeth, it’s not easy to reach the deep inside of the mouth, leaving molars and teeth not brushed thoroughly. GE designed an electric toothbrush that made rapid automatic bristle motions, either back-and-forth in rotation in order to clean teeth. A modern electric toothbrush is usually powered by a rechargeable battery charged through inductive charging when the brush sits in the charging base between uses. This is an example of design thinking in production.

Helping people find safe water sources near them is one of the ways in which non-profit tech start-up mWater has improved thousands of lives. mWater apps and software let users find, monitor, and map the quality of water and sanitation sites.  This also helps local authorities detect water infrastructure gaps. Designed for field use, the apps work both online and offline – using the cloud for automatic data syncing when online and GPS for finding locations offline. With over 10,000 active users in 93 countries, mWater already has a database of over 350,000 public and private water sites around the world.

Innovation is at the core of businesses. Delivering differentiated and satisfying customer experiences can lead to a boost in loyalty, market share, and revenues.

Imagine what a similar focus on employee experiences could mean for business. Leading companies are already recognizing that the employee experience is the new battleground for competitive advantage.

Organisations and world economies are constantly evaluating ways and means that can restore balance and help jumpstart slumping livelihoods. In the ongoing Covid pandemic, and at this critical juncture, organisations are leaning on Human Resources (HR) to restore employee morale and boost confidence in the company’s future. Adapting to this rapidly changing environment requires a renovated approach. The Human Resources fraternity has been prompt and agile in shedding the old ways and facing unprecedented challenges with new and innovative ideas. HR plays a crucial role in enabling organisations to transition from working-at-office to working-from-home, almost overnight. In short, the pandemic catapulted HR teams to occupy a seat on the strategy table from being just a support function. 

Design Thinking in Human Resources can enable organizations in understanding, envisioning, and designing how employees experience work, perceiving the employer-employee relationship through talent solution platform, storming, norming and forming ideas quickly with employee experience ideas, and prioritizing action to ensure consistent employee experience as described in team development by Bruce Tuckman.

It is difficult for organisations to attract and retain talent. Regardless of a company’s location or size, attracting and retaining talent at the top, middle and bottom positions. Employee expectations are racketing up against Human Resources as comparisons are made to frictionless customer experience outside of the office. Organisations are expecting the Human Resources teams to build agility in the internal and external environment. Organizations demand Human Resources to help in making better decision making, for giving actionable insights, increasing creativity in all processes for making better people decisions. How can Human Resources help the organisation, its employees, and themselves?

Changing the expectations of customers require new ways of thinking about people and designing people management strategies. Design thinking helps in this area.  Design thinking and design research help in making strategic decisions at many levels. This is an example of how AirBnB’s strategic team uses data to address current user experience challenges on the social media platform. The year 2009 was tough for Airbnb as it was very close to going bust. The start-up registering only $200 per week as revenue and were nowhere close to making a sustainable business out of their initiative. The founders noticed a pattern that all their listings in New York had poor images and it was very difficult for customers to see what they would be paying for. One of them – Graham suggested a completely non-scalable and a non-technical solution to the problem. He advised travelling to New York, renting a camera, visiting all the properties to take good quality images and replace the old amateur images with the new high resolution and beautiful ones. Even though the resolution was not backed by data, the results were amazing. After improving the quality of images for the listings, the revenue generated rose to $400 per week. Design thinking requires strong backup data as well as customer feedback.

Design Thinking enables Human Resources to think beyond the typical process and pragmatic approach to service delivery and focus instead on the experience and outcomes that it is looking to drive. The principles of repetition, trying, failing, retrying, and improving are critical to success in design thinking. It cannot be a do it once approach, where one solution is rolled out, the program ends, and then for years it’s never improved or assessed.

Design Thinking is based on understanding the in-depth needs of different stakeholder profiles; to conduct design thinking is to firmly put your feet in the shoes of your stakeholder. This is why empathy is a crucial element of the practice. Its goal is to generate solutions that bring value to all stakeholders. In the case of Human Resources, this could be the managers, employees, or candidates that experience any part of the Human Resources process.

Since Human Resources primarily handles the recruitment, employment experience, and the exit process of employees and represents the company, understanding human needs and executing accordingly becomes crucial. In Human Resources design thinking focuses on building a structure, a design for operations that would align the goals of the company with its employees. It starts by building the problem statement to find ways of resolving that. In most organisations, a fast-paced work environment demands quick solutions to the challenges of humans. Unlike machines, humans are after all, not engineered to deliver automated accurate results around the clock. Innovation is the only way to meet this challenge and design thinking is capable of driving that innovation. Tim Brown, one of the pioneers of Design Thinking believes that “leading through questions” is the best way to drive innovation. Questions bring us closer to stakeholder requirements and help us understand the scope of improvement. In the following areas of Human Resources let’s see how design thinking helps:

Human Resources Planning

Human Resources planning involves recruiting, selecting, hiring, and training the right candidates to make them ready for the job. This is one of the crucial processes for any company since it builds the branding for them. Design thinking can optimise this process by incorporating empathy. It can help recruiters to create a welcoming environment for new recruits at the company. Continuous interaction between both employer and employee seeking the job opportunity helps set expectations. Empathy will also help the HR team to identify any intrinsic challenges and address them. Ideation, another crucial step in design thinking encourages users to be creative and think of newer ways of addressing an issue. Interactive sessions and understanding the core characteristic of employee is vital to innovation. Human Resources teams must discard conventional approaches for driving innovation in recruitment policies.

Continuous Performance Management

Performance management aims at recognising the meaningful work that employees do and rewarding that appropriately. Employees feel elated when their good work is lauded by the organization. For understanding the human potential, organizations must have measurable Human Resources tools for assessing performance. Employees like to get recognition for their talent and domain knowledge. Design Thinking can make this process more effective by using tools of surveys to connect and empathise with the employees and understand their concerns and expectations. The Human Resources teams in organizations must keep updating their performance management policies and tools.  

Retention policies

A sense of belonging is most important for human relations. When employees feel that they are cared for by the organization they put in more effort; when they are appreciated, their productivity augments. The Human Resources department is responsible for maintaining a harmonious relationship between the employees and the company. The biggest problem is faced when organisations don’t have clear communication channels with employees. Lack of a proper communication channel can lead to various issues and misunderstandings. Employees must stay well connected with the organization. Design Thinking can enhance this process with an empathy-driven approach towards issues that concern both parties. By using the design thinking methods, the Human Resources team can assess problematic situations with good solutions that pacify both equally. 

Compensation

Compensation and benefits comprise a large part of what the HR department handles. Right from the time a candidate joins a company, gets promoted to the time he quits or retires, the Human Resources department reviews and updates his/her compensation. Design thinking methods can help the Human Resources team to understand the requirements and expectations of the employees and the budgets of the employers and optimise the compensation accordingly in cash and kind. Even while designing policies, empathy-driven approach can help formulate policies that meet the needs of the employees and truly benefit them.

Employee engagement

This is a priority area for HR. Design thinking can offer a variety of practices to create inspiring workplaces. There are many organizations that make work place environment fun-filled. The tagline “all work and no play make Jack a dull boy” is brought into practice. Monthly/Quarterly outings, monthly get-togethers, recreation nights, pipe music played during work hours are some examples of how employees are kept entertained. User-friendly IT systems, weekly changing canteen foods made as per choice, and some other welfare practices are some ways of cooperation in which the employee feels cared for. The aim is to improve engagement, creativity, and productivity. Empathy is a basic requirement of design thinking.

Design thinking is at core of innovation

Many organizations fail to create innovative work culture. Design thinking helps in infusing innovation culture in organizations. Some organizations have succeeded. One such organization is 3M Technologies. In 1968, Spencer Silver, a scientist at 3M’s headquarters was working to create a strong adhesive. Accidentally, he developed a new material that was light enough to easily remove and peel apart. Silver felt that he had invented something unique and useful but struggled to find what that use could be. Another employee Art Fry used Spencer’s adhesive to anchor his bookmark in his hymn book which became one of the stellar products of 3M. A few years later Fry utilized 3M’s sanctioned “permitted bootlegging” policy to develop the idea. Design thinking flourishes on empathy, expansive thinking, and experimentation.

Conclusion

Modern Human Resources and design thinking go hand. Employee experience is most important in employee value proposition and retention. It helps engaging employees more actively in organisational change and by creating an environment and experiences that inspire people and make them more creative and productive.

Decision making is the process to select a course of action from a number of alternatives. Like planning, decision making also requires features like forecasting and action plans. For any organization, policy documents help in taking managerial decisions. But these are decisions of routine nature, which we also call operational decisions. Strategic or important decisions are obviously taken after considering different alternatives. In order to be a successful manager one has to necessarily develop decision-making skills.

What is a decision cycle? It is a sequence of steps used by an organization on a repeated basis to reach and implement decisions, not necessarily each decision adds to profits, but organizations must learn from mistakes made by them. For growth and sustainability a business relies on decision cycle. The ‘decision cycle’ as a phrase is used to broadly categorize various methods of making decisions, going upstream to the need, downstream to the outcomes, and cycling around to connect the outcomes to the needs.

Understanding that organizations go through a specific decision-making process allows business firms and manufacturing-related goods and services to develop programs designed to influence each stage of the business process. If a marketer knows, for example, that a customer is about to establish purchasing specifications, he or she can provide useful technical information or offer advice on industry standards and control factors that may affect the formulation of those specifications. A decision cycle is said to occur when an explicitly specified decision model is used to guide a decision and then the outcomes of that decision are assessed against the need for the decision. This cycle includes specification of desired results (the decision need), tracking of outcomes and assessment of outcomes against the desired results. Success in the battle of doing business is about making decisions more quickly than competing firms can.

All businesses operate around certain business process cycles. A business cycle refers to various trends that occur within an industry/sector, such as growth or withering. Many times, management decisions are impacted by where the company stands in reference to a particular cycle. Macro economy also play an important role in management decisions. When the economy is in a cycle of withdrawal, management of firm will act conservatively, whereas in a cycle of expansion, management may tend to act more aggressively to gain as much market share as possible.

Characteristic of Business Cycle:

Usually any business faces four distinct trends: slowdown, bottom, growth and peak. All businesses, even the most aggressive sales organization experience these cycles. A slowdown occurs after a market has experienced a normal period of expansion. This is often followed by a period of sales maturity and product integration by the existing customer base, which is viewed as a slowdown. During a slowdown, competition enters the market that also creates weaker sales. Finally the business hits a bottom. After this bottom and rough period business gets aggressive and makes steps of expansion and marketing efforts to aggressively go after new market share. Following this period of expansion, business will again begin to see a peak in their performance and start the cycle all over.

Macro Business Cycle Considerations:

Macro cycles include the trend of the overall economy. During periods of sustained economic growth, businesses should seek to gain market share by increasing advertising and market efforts. Also, during periods of economic contraction, business managers may decide to consolidate their operations and position themselves for slow, or negative, growth by maintaining higher cash balances and cutting non-essential costs.

Examples of some decision cycles:

OODA Loop: Originally this decision making tool was coined in the 1950s by Air Force colonel and military strategist John Boyd as a way to illustrate the action and decision cycle that a fighter pilot goes through during an aerial dogfight, it has since been applied to disciplines as diverse as business, medicine, law and the acquisition process in the military. The quality and speed of those decisions get enhanced by new command-and-control precepts and advances in information, surveillance and reconnaissance tools, sensors and systems. As a result, military forces have been improving on their ability to observe, orient, decide and attack, better known as the OODA loop.

For the military, the OODA loop is called by different term at different times. In a kinetic war, it’s often called find, fix and finish, or the more extended find, fix, track, target, engage and assess. It also means something different in Iraq than it does in Afghanistan.

PDCA (Plan–Do–Check–Act) PDCA was made popular by Dr. W. Edwards Deming, who is considered as the father of modern quality control. The concept of PDCA is based on the scientific method. The scientific method can be better explained as “hypothesis” which can be proved under statistical control as a three-step process of specification, production, and inspection. It can be specified as scientific method of hypothesis, experiment, and evaluation. According to Deming, during his lectures in Japan in the early 1950s, the Japanese participants shortened the steps to the now traditional plan, do, check, and act.  A fundamental principle of the scientific method and PDCA is the iteration: once a hypothesis is confirmed (or negated), executing the cycle again will extend the knowledge further. Repeating the PDCA cycle can bring the practitioners closer to their goals, usually a perfect operation and output.

Herbert Simon’s model: Herbert Simon made key contributions to enhance our understanding of the decision-making process. In fact, he pioneered the field of decision support systems. According to Simon and his later work with Newell, decision-making is a process with distinct stages. He suggested for the first time the decision-making model of human beings. His model of decision-making has three stages: Intelligence which deals with the problem identification and the data collection on the problem. Design which deals with the generation of alternative solutions to the problem at hand. Choice which is selecting the ‘best’ solution from amongst the alternative solutions using some criterion. Much later, other scholars expanded his framework to five steps (Intelligence–Design–Choice–Implementation–Learning).

Business Analytics: Business analytics (BA) refers to the skills, technologies, practices for continuously connecting exploration and investigation of past business performance to gain insight and drive business planning. Business analytics focuses on developing new insights and understanding of business performance based on data and statistical methods. In contrast, business intelligence traditionally focuses on using a consistent set of metrics to both measure past performance and guide business planning, which is also based on data and statistical methods. Business analytics makes extensive use of statistical analysis, including explanatory and predictive modelling and fact-based management to drive decision making. It is therefore closely related to management science. Analytics may be used as input for human decisions or may drive fully automated decisions.

Design Thinking: design thinking includes “building up” ideas, with few, or no limits. This helps reduce fear of failure among managers. The phrase “thinking outside the box” has been coined to describe one goal of the brainstorming phase and is encouraged, since this can aid in the discovery of hidden elements and ambiguities in the situation and discovering potentially faulty assumptions. In design thinking observation takes center stage. Observation can discern what people really do as opposed to what you are told that they do. Getting out of the comfort zone and involving oneself in the process, product, shopping experience is fundamental.

Design thinking in problem definition also requires cross functional insight into each problem by varied perspectives as well as constant and relentless questioning why? Until finally the simple answers are behind you and the true issues are revealed. Finally, defining the problem via design thinking requires the suspension of judgment in defining the problem statement because what we say can be very different to what we mean.

Decision cycle is evolving in different forms and different perceptions in the business world.