The success of brands like Nike, Google, Apple, and Amazon has clearly shown that design thinking is a breakthrough methodology for any business that wants to create solutions and products. However, you should acknowledge design thinking is not limited to products, as the methodology is applicable in all kinds of business and operational processes. Particularly, design thinking is relevant in HR because empathy is a vital aspect when dealing with employee concerns. Human resources and people’s operations are more likely to apply design thinking in daily business operations and other departments.
What is Design Thinking?
A design thinking approach is a human-centered, iterative, and collaborative process that helps with creative problem-solving. It makes it easy for companies to create innovative solutions founded on understanding the audience’s needs.
The Design Thinking Process
For effective design thinking in HR, you should keep in mind these five logical stages.
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- Empathize
The first thing is to learn about the personas of the end-users, how they’re experiencing the solution, then gain an empathetic understanding of the challenges or problems they face. This shows the essence of design thinking, wherein you better understand the problem with empathy. When you put people at the core and understand their needs or frustrations, you will find their real issues. With respect to recruitment, you should understand all about prospective candidates, their expectations, their needs, and wants. Also, a design thinking approach to performance management begins by reviewing how the current approach impacts employees. The approach helps you collect information through interviews, focus groups, feedback, and journaling, which helps you understand the process.
- Define
The next step is to analyze what you learned about the end-user and define the problem you should solve. You can begin by focusing on a small and important piece of the problem. In recruiting, for example, you could start by improving the job application process to make it less tedious. After understanding the problem, you can define it. At this point, you’ll be synthesizing and focusing on the problems. For example, from the recruiting standpoint, the actual problem can be to attract candidates with a specific persona. Create high-performing teams that support each other through underperformance management.
- Ideate
You also need to brainstorm solutions to the problems identified and choose the best ideas to explore. At this stage, it’s vital to be open-minded, let your imagination roam free, and think outside the box. This begins fun, as it’s where you unleash your creativity and find the best possible methods to deal with the problem. Explore ideas even if different from each other, as this helps you widen your scope and allows you to think outside the box. By doing this, you explore brainstorming with open-mindedness and creativity at the core. Find ideas that will help you improve your branding, social recruiting strategy, job descriptions, and more. For effective performance management, think about options you can implement to encourage collaboration by taking feedback and mentoring teams.
- Prototype
Choose a few viable ideas, which should be easy to implement and build solutions that meet your users’ needs. Narrow down the long list of ideas and filter them to see what survives. Instead of quantity and volume, trim the ideas down to quality, relevance, and feasibility. After doing this, come up with a list you can manage. If a specific piece of performance management needs to be addressed, you can have two mock-ups like bringing external leaders and coaches or unleashing talent from your team.
If you’re working on recruitment, you want to design impactful job descriptions with media content for attention. Also, explore social media channels to interact with potential candidates. All this helps you try out different ideas. In the prototyping stage, you don’t need to invest a lot of resources, but you need to build on pieces of solution repeatedly.
- Test
Lastly, implement the solutions with end-users. You can begin with a small group to get feedback. Listen to the feedback to understand how you can make improvements. At this level, you go to the field and test the solutions. This helps you assess and evaluate the solutions to know if they can fulfill your assumptions and expectations. It’s important to be clear with the solutions that are working or ineffective. Give priority to ideas and solutions that are actually working. It’s more like a pre-final step in the design thinking process, in which you come up with the ultimate solution. Your solution can be an improved version of a prototype or a combination of prototypes.
Design Thinking in HR
At the core of design thinking, it prioritizes customers’ needs and creates solutions to address the problems. The learnings focus on empathetic observations of the way people behave in specific environments and react to the things going on in that environment. So, the approach is hands-on and helps in creating innovative solutions. The human element is the core of the design. The idea is to design processes around humans, not just for humans.
So, you first get evidence about how humans behave towards a service or product and improve the experience through gradual iterations. In design thinking, you don’t focus on creating a single solution. Instead, you implement this as a continuous process that involves adapting thought and approaches to meet end-user needs.
Application of Design Thinking in HR Processes
In the future of work, organizations will need to implement the alignment of business, individuals, social government institutions, and other employers. Design thinking principles are proposed as the solution to drive this alignment and also meet the challenges of workforce maintenance, development, and future planning. Following this perspective, it’s clear design thinking is a great tool for HR, as it shifts to a customer-driven approach and focuses on providing an exceptional employee experience. Here are some of the ways design thinking can help HR.
- Helping HR Transform Itself: HR planning includes selecting, recruiting, hiring, and training candidates to make them ready for a position. This is a crucial process for a company, as it builds assets that can drive growth. You can incorporate a few human-centered design principles.
- Design thinking provides a philosophy and a guideline, as it gives HR exciting methodologies that help to reinvent processes in different aspects of work. A structured approach transforms traditional models to embrace a people-oriented system that personalizes solutions. The idea is to build sharper HR teams, which overcome time zones, silos, and cultural obstacles. The result is that this provides the much-needed space for innovative problem-solving in HR. All these changes provide a conducive environment that makes it easy to onboard and train employees.
- Performance Management: The idea behind embracing policies for performance management is to ensure the organization identifies good work and rewards employees who contribute to the performance. It’s common to see employees feel their effort is not recognized or rewarded enough, and this often happens because HR teams don’t have the tools to measure performance accurately. Through design thinking, HR teams can make this possible by introducing tools that help them conduct surveys and connect with the employees to understand their expectations and concerns. An automated performance management system platform helps managers get updated information on how their teams are doing. This gives an accurate evaluation that allows the company to reward deserving individuals.
- Enhancing Employee Experience: It’s a priority for the HR department to improve employee engagement. Through design thinking, organizations get tools that help in creating inspiring workplaces, innovative roles, and user-friendly systems. This is to help enhance collaboration with employees for better performance in the different departments of the organization. Also, it’s the duty of the HR department to nurture a positive relationship between the employer and employees. This is often the case if the communication between the organization and employees is not structured. Lack of structure means there’s a lack of proper communication, an issue that could trigger problems. When an organization implements design thinking, it introduces an empathy-driven approach to matters affecting the organization and employees.
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- Compensation and Benefits: These include a significant part of what an HR department deals with daily. From when a candidate is hired, promoted to when they retire or quit, the HR department will follow up with their compensation demands. Using design thinking methods helps the HR department review the employees’ expectations and requirements. Also, it reveals the budgets of the employers and optimizes compensation accordingly. When designing policies, following an empathy-driven approach will formulate policies that address the needs of employees and benefit them.
Conclusion
Bringing a human aspect into the picture is a good way to take an organization to a new level. Design thinking includes reviewing how your employees feel about working for your organization or business. This is the next step in enhancing a human resource department and, as a result, your employees. These ideas help you create an engaging and rewarding environment for your employees.
