Challenge

Our South-Eastern European Bank has the intention to implement for the IT workforce a  series of activities that will increase the sense of “belonging” in the Bank. IT workforce  comprises of 600 people and a vast majority expresses a feeling of demotivation, doesn’t  participate actively in strategic corporate initiatives and in the long run conflicts arise within  several IT teams.

Following the Design Thinking Methodology, aim of this Project is to investigate the deeper  needs of the IT workforce as well as the underlying root causes that will lead to human  centric ideas in order to improve the current situation. The duration of the Project is 30 days  and the team comprises by two Design Thinking experts as well as a diversified team of  fifteen members.

Selection

We have decided to proceed with the Learning Launch process. Beleiving that the Learning  Launch process is a carefully designed prototype, designed to test the key underlying value- generating assumptions of our new initiative. We make several assumptions and Learning  Launch will either confirm or dis-confirm our assumptions.

[https://www.coursera.org/learn/uva-darden-design-thinking- innovation/lecture/F04r6/learning-launch-tool]

Application

First of all, we identified our assumptions and our team started testing those assumptions. We  conducted staff interviews focusing on the following axis of questions:

  How can we facilitate everyday life of IT workforce through simple, daily activities?

  How can we empower the sense of value and importance of the IT workforce?

  How can we facilitate a human-centric environment for the IT workforce?

During the interviews we focused on: what they said/ what they did/ how they felt and what  they thought, and from that, we created an empathy map:

The aforementioned questions resulted to more than 175 responses, that were then filtered. The  filtering process was based on three criterias: Most Connected with user need , Most Relevant to  the original challenge, Most Inspirational. At the end we came down with a shortlist of 8 ideas in  order to evolve and proceed with our experimentation.

For our first Learning Launch we aimed at ideas focused on the concept of facilitation of the  everyday life of IT workforce through simple, daily activities. We included additional  questionnaires to our experiment, whose results were demonstrated on storyboards created by  the Design Thinking experts. Our initial assumption is based on changing the ‘Meeting Culture’ in  the organization by improving meeting rules and mindset. At the end, it appeared although  people were not happy with the meeting culture of the bank, this was not the primary source of  dissatisfaction morale and lack of motivation.

For our second Learning Launch we aimed at ideas focused on the concept of empowerment of  the sense of value and importance of the IT workforce. This time we conducted open  brainstorming sessions in open meeting rooms. Storyboards were created by the team members  themselves, this was a fun activity, innovative ideas and feelings were expressed. The deliverable  was really amazing: people valued extremely small things of high value, like a healthy snack or a  personalized health tip, activities that demonstrate that they are valued by the organization, and  somebody is taking care of them.

For our third Learning Launch we aimed at ideas focused on the concept of facilitation of a  human-centric environment for the Bank’s IT workforce. Members were encouraged to describe  in few written sentences an ideal scenario of what a human centric office would be like for them  and at the same time respond to specific coaching questions. The questionnaires were focused  on a tool that was launched at that time by the Bank aiming to cultivate respect between  employees. Soon, the experiments results revealed that people did not believe in the power and  the impact of such a tool in the cultivation of respectful relationships, and thus in the feeling of  content and belonging in the everyday life. The initial assumption was not confirmed.

Insight

By applying the Learning Launch tool, the team identified few assumptions and designed  experiments to test these assumptions. We thereby came up with gained insights on what  should be done from a corporate point of view in order that the IT personnel feels a sense of  belonging and is thus more motivated and productive. The sense of belonging was a multi-factor  and dynamic process that in order to achieve it takes simple actions to change.

I believe that the second Learning Launch revealed an important truth: sometimes the team  spirit generated via live brainstorming can be more efficient than questionnaires, essays,  powerBI tools and analytics. When it comes to human feeling and behavior human touch and  team spirit were catalysts. The Bank Corporation soon launched a series of simple activities and  offerings that highly increased staff morale and sense of belonging.

Approach

The Learning Launch has proven to be the appropriate tool in order to tackle our problem with  the Design Thinking methodology. Next time we will focus on the team recommended insights,  insight reports and idea repository and will bring teams together in order to efficiently create  narratives for our experiments.

