Design Thinking Why is “design thinking” the key? read more > Case Study: Employee Engagement & Empowerment With Design Thinking Context Our client is a professional membership body with more than 25,000 members and 200 head office staff that is seeking to secure “Great Place To Work” Accreditation. Over 3 years our client has failed to make significant progress on their journey to secure accreditation. GPTW staff surveys have been identified critical shortcomings. Challenge Together with the CEO & HR Director, we identified that the challenge was to engage employees and to get their help to build a better work environment. Solution: Service Design ‘Design Thinking’ is an innovation methodology that most often gets deployed in a business development setting where it is used to devise new products and services. 3.1 Engage & Empower We proposed that ‘Design Thinking’ could be used as an Employee Engagement tool. Our aim was to engage & empower employees to develop new work processes, to win senior management approval for their ideas and, in the process, to start to shift the organisations culture to address the shortcomings revealed by GPTW surveys. 3.2 Workshops: A Starting Point We designed and delivered workshops with almost 25% of staff to train them on Design Thinking methodology. 6 staff teams were formed during the workshops and each team identified a challenge and a rudimentary idea and prototype service or process to address the challenge. 3.3 Coach & Mentor In the following months we worked alongside these teams to design, develop and test their new services. We also worked closely with senior leadership to align their expectations. A Shark Tank event was held where the teams pitched their ideas. Senior management, under our tutelage, reviewed the ideas, provided feedback and assigned one C level officer as a sponsor to each of the teams to assist them to launch their new service. This process is ongoing. Outcome Despite deploying this intervention only 3 months prior to the annual GPTW survey, our client made a significant step towards achieving accreditation; this is the first time that they have made progress in 3 years. Other staff surveys have underlined the positive impact on staff engagement & morale. Senior leadership are delighted with the programme and continue to support further innovation initiatives on their journey to achieving accreditation. Why should you use an approach like this for your business or organisation? 1. Engaging and empowering staff can help you to build an agile and responsive organisation with the resilience to tackle each & every challenge. 2. In the race for talent an organisation that puts engagement & empowerment at the top of the agenda can secure the best talent ahead of competitors. 3. Building innovation capability can help you to tackle many other challenges & become a critically important source of long-term competitive advantage.