To understand the employee experience better, our team of Experience Strategists applied a Design Thinking approach to identify behaviors and environments that contribute to and detract from the employee experience at a consulting firm.
Why Design Thinking? We chose this methodology as it focuses on uncovering people’s perceptions and unmet needs as we identify insights and understand their journey to reframe our own understanding of what the problems really are, which oftentimes become blurred by our own assumptions.
How did we approach this?
IMMERSE // Observe and document the human experience to obtain qualitative knowledge.
SYNTHESIZE // Use that knowledge to frame the problem and shape our own understanding.
IDEATE // Combine and contrast dissimilar information to provoke unanticipated and unexpected ideas.
PROTOTYPE // Build, test, and iterate light and lean examples to drive home solutions.
Empathy Interviews: 14 interviews across career tracks, levels, markets, work locations, and tenure totaling over 30 hours of interviews.
Live Journey Mapping: We asked employees to share their experiences from their highs to their lows, from before they were hired to the present.
Image Association: “If the company was a chair, what kind of chair would it be?” This question gave us a deeper perception of how employees compare the firm to a familiar object.
Field Observations: We observed employees in their “natural habitat” at offices in Northern Virginia and Washington D.C and attended a handful of Firm events.
What did we hear in the interviews?
“Compensation and benefits are very generous. But I think the company is capable of better, more innovative work. I feel disconnected from the rest of the company. I think some more emphasis on the culture would go a long way.”
“We’ve become more focused to make a profit than we are with delivering quality to the client to help them succeed.”
“I wouldn’t say it’s a chair that you would curl up with a blanket and read a book with a glass of wine, but you can definitely sit and like, have a talk with someone and be comfortable sitting in conversation.”
“You essentially have to get rehired when your contract ends. Being the type of person who doesn’t know how to network puts you at a real disadvantage here.”
“There was never a lack of work in my first few years here. Now, it is sad to see good people leave just because they can’t get traction ... it creates fear.”
“Right now the team is literally in production mode, like here’s a client ... build it, develop it. But what is the in-between? I wanted it to be very user centric.”
Field Observations
Synthesis represents the culmination of data, knowledge, and observations from field research.
The time we take to look back and reflect on our findings allows us to make meaning of our data. By breaking apart quotes and observations we uncover patterns and themes.
1,142 Data Points
68 Themes
6 Insights
Here are some insights we gathered about the Employee Experience:
Inconsistency does not inspire innovation.
Despite the Firm's robust projects, poor follow-through leave employees to feel like their ideas are not a priority.
Career Managers make or break the employee experience.
Career Managers work extra hours to care for their employees. This also makes it easier for other CM’s to neglect their duties.
Employees struggle to do the work right.
Employees believe they are hired for their specialized skill sets to solve client problems, but end up supporting clients who dismantle the integrity of their work.
Fixation on ‘billability’ spreads fear.
Employees question their job stability and worth when they cannot find a new project. Billability sends the message that the Firm prioritizes profit over people.
Continuous change creates insecure employees.
Employees see the value in the ability to adapt to changing market needs, but what creates market competitiveness often bring instability to employees. People want to grow with the Firm, not grow irrelevant to the Firm.
Survival requires more than providing value to your client.
Employees quickly discover their job search doesn't end with the offer letter. In order to stay employed, they must continuously self-promote, network, and depend on reciprocity with colleagues to acquire new projects.
Phase One of the Employee Experience Study was completed in 2016. The research and analysis presented here were designed by members of the Experience Strategy team which includes Design Thinking, Service Design and UX.
To continue to investigate the employee experience, we recommend these next steps:
Developing experience maps to represent the employee experience.
Expand user groups to employees who recently left the Firm and why.
Conduct ideation, co-creation, and test any concepts and ideas that emerge.
I teamed up with a few colleagues after the project was completed to see what ideas we could come up to help solve some of the problems.
Some (crazy) ideas to enhance the Employee Experience:
Group teams by client goals, not by departments.
Hire for a Career Manage role, not add it onto workload.
Let someone other than the ‘leader’ lead meetings.
Organize weekly team walks. Get out of the building.
Mandatory “upcoming contract” deadline six months before current contract ends.
Make the organization flat (holacracy).
Sound the ‘Idea Gong’ whenever someone has a good idea.
Ditch the cubicles.
Ban e-mails for a day. (What?!). Have employees ask questions and solve problems in person.
Make all salaries visible.
Provide a stipend for employees to design their own workstation.
Fire jerks.
“Why is culture so important to a business? The stronger the culture, the less corporate process a company needs. When the culture is strong, you can trust everyone to do the right thing. Ever notice how tribes don’t require much process? That is because there is a strong trust that it supersedes process. ”