By: Smita Bhat, Director Consulting - Business transformation, LTIMindtree

As the world is preparing to move towards a return to work, there are many challenges that organizations are facing. Given that remote working is here to stay, a Gartner Survey reveals that 82% of company leaders plan to allow employees to work remotely, in a hybrid model or permanently. Organizations need to be prepared for these distributed ways of working across the globe. Today, millennials form most of workplaces globally, and they expect organizations to be independent, with access to information at their fingertips and tailored solutions for everyday life. These viewpoints will continue to evolve as environmental, technological, and business changes occur in the years to come.

Modern Employee Expectations from the Workplace:

A modern employee experience is all about how they see, do, feel, and think on a day-to-day basis. It is about creating a sense of belongingness, transparency, opportunities to enhance their skills, working with diverse teams, and organizational values and fostering a sense of purpose within and outside of their work. A ‘One size fits all’ engagement approach will not work. Organizations need to create more employee-centric experiences to keep them engaged.

Creating the ‘Moment that Matters’ through a Design Thinking Mindset

The solution to the above questions lies in designing systems and policies that are more employee-centric, connected, self-driven, with easy access to information, and other more remote-friendly approaches.

LTIMindtree’s point of view on addressing these challenges is through a design thinking approach as a mindset to address the problem in all three lenses: Business, Design, and Technology- to build strategically viable, humanly desired, and technologically feasible solutions and using a collaborative approach to create moments that matter to employees.

Design Thinking Approach for a Modern Employee Experience

The pandemic has created a big shift in how societies work and individuals communicate. We have seen how this rapid shift in ways of working has moved from traditional work from office to remote working. Traditionally, human resources have been approaching engagement, learning, rewards, performance management, and culture as separate entities run by different leaders in silos, with their own programs. Recent McKinsey research suggests that future-ready companies need to have purpose, speed, and simplicity; they have to thrive to be more learning-oriented and innovative.

Modern employees want connected experiences for their day-to-day life. They demand a purpose-driven organization, which has a great learning culture and an ecosystem that is empathetic and cares for their holistic wellbeing. Design thinking helps address this problem through a human-centric approach.

For example, there could be several types of workers in an organization:

• Online employees who are always logged in on multiple devices and typically work from a desk
• Offline employees who do not work from their desks nor have a company laptop, but may use their personal devices like phones at work (Typically, factory workers)
• Frontline employees who represent your organization to customers and are always on the go by using mobile devices for most of their work

Design thinking helps cater to their unique needs and identity pain points and understands the ways of working throughout an employee’s journey. A design thinking mindset helps focus on people and experiences and not so much on processes and technology. The approach here is more human-centric and empathetic. The employee experiences are co-created involving different viewpoints from employees and the stakeholders managing them. Design thinking promotes building an agile mindset by creating prototypes and tests that help to constantly receive feedback from employees, and also helps build on opportunities to constantly look at creating these superior experiences.

Conclusion:

The pandemic has altered ways of working, which means remote interactions are here to stay. Employee expectations from organizations have changed, especially post the pandemic, where the focus has shifted towards new age employee benefits (work-life balance, holistic health, culture, skill development opportunities, and a safe and sanitized workplace). Enterprises will need to reimagine ways to engage with the modern-day workforce given these dynamics (as disengaged employees will affect growth prospects).

A design thinking mindset helps create the optimal employee experience through designing teams, systems, and policies that are employee-centric, connected, and remote-friendly. This takes place by focusing on creating a human-centric design (empathetic), co-creating experiences with employees and stakeholders, learning on the go, and ensuring continuous improvement. This in turn helps organizations enhance modern employee experience design by creating more human-centered solutions.