RE-DESIGNING HR, LEARNING & DEVELOPMENT IN OUR COMPANY

1. Challenge: Describe your challenge, including all relevant information.

In a recent staff survey many features of the HR, learning and development function were  criticised as being less effective than they could be. In comparison to other aspects of being an  employee, certain activities such as appraisal, supervision, talent management, training and  development received markedly lower scores. Staff also felt detached from and unaware of the  overall corporate strategy and felt that senior leaders were distant from operations teams on the  ground. The OD department was asked to tackle this challenge and begin work re-designing  internal HR, learning and development services to be a more effective driver of staff satisfaction  and business growth.

2. Selection: In your own words, briefly describe the tool you selected (e.g., what it is and why you

selected it for your challenge -- including any appropriate video lecture references).

I selected the tool of storytelling – Brandon Hernandez the CLO at Mars described the process in his  week 2 video interview as conveying logical messages through stories about an organisation,  from the perspective of people and their experiences, incorporating emotion and making clear a  larger organisational purpose.  I agree this would be more powerful than assembling a list or  matrix of service elements and mapping these to different categories of employee.  I wanted to  make the concepts “come alive” by fictionalising how an employee with particular needs and  circumstances might experience the newly designed service elements.  This particularly allows  us to sell the “challenges” inherent in current employee realities, which colleagues would  identify with and consider how the new proposed service would be a better response than  existing approaches. By including innovative and new methods within the stories I also wanted  to generate some excitement and interest among colleagues, generating support for this  change initiative.

3. Application: Describe how you applied the tool you selected to your challenge (e.g., what you

did and how the tool was applied effectively or ineffectively).

Having agreed on using storytelling to describe how services would be experienced by fictional

individuals, colleagues initially found the task hard and began generating something more like a  list of services with columns to be ticked for each employee type.  This appeared to be  ineffective use of the tool.   What helped turn this around was to give names to a fictional new  hire, and to an existing aspiring manager and create a brief pen picture of these people.  This  generated more ideas as we began thinking how “Jane’s” journey from accepting a job offer to  starting work would map out.  For example one person suggested Jane would be set up with  access to our e-learning system and invited to complete some introductory training before her  first day’s work.  Another colleague suggested Jane would be put in touch with a “buddy” in her  new team, so she could find out about practicalities like dress-code, lunch arrangements,  parking provision before her first day, and that this relationship would continue in Jane’s initial  months of being an employee,

4. Insight: Describe the insight you gained from applying the tool you selected to your challenge

(e.g., how an insight affected your thinking about the challenge and about design thinking more  broadly).

The story telling technique allowed people to connect emotionally with the experience and

challenges that a person might encounter as they interact with HR and learning and  development services in different contexts.  It was interesting to see how colleagues used the  stories they generated to set high goals – for example Jane’s story ended with her successful  completion of probation period, and described her as “very proud to be a part of the company”.

This picture of a company made up of people who are proud about the work they do and the  organisation they belong to is aspirational and compelling.  I would suggest this is a powerful  conclusion to the story and this emotional outcome is not necessarily something I would have  considered in designing new HR on-boarding and induction approaches.  In subsequent

discussion with a wider group this particular element was picked out as a key criterion – this is  exactly what we as members of the HR and Organisation Development directorate would wish  to achieve through enhanced process design.

Storytelling also enabled us to see how different service elements fitted together to create a  personalised solution to an individual’s needs – rather than simply viewing our HR and training  services as a long menu of different items.

5. Approach: Describe what you might do differently next time -- applying the same tool you

selected or a different one -- and the reason(s) why.

I think in a future use of storytelling it might help to have ONE pre-worked story to demonstrate  how the approach might be applied to a similar challenge – not necessarily the same challenge.   So for example I might take a different function like internal marketing support and tell a brief  story of how an employee needs help with marketing their service in the local community and  how they approach central marketing and get help and support which leads to raised local  awareness of their services and increased customer flow.   Another thing might be to add  names and brief pen pictures to EACH of the customer groups for which we want to generate  stories for.

