Challenges

The HR Manager in our company recently received numerous complaints regarding the difficulties faced  by the employees in collaborating with the HR department for their needs. This was mostly in terms of  time and effort involved. She said some people were complaining to her that HR department took long  time in getting the employees on onboard. She also mentioned that employees were confused as to whom  to contact in terms of their HR related needs and the queries would be routed to her  which she sometimes  doesn’t find time to reply to since she is busy with other important tasks. She mentioned that because of  this, some of the employees were not happy in the company and this could affect their productivity  adversely. She assigned the task to study these problems in the HR department and to come up with the  insights.

Selection

I decided to proceed with design thinking concept since this task involved understanding of the customers  (employees in this case) involved and I wanted to explore more and to reach an agreement. I tried to  research on the “What is” situation. I listed the users who are facing the problem with the HR related  services. I selected a few employees as sample. I got a list of employees in the HR department who handles  the employee onboarding process and the ones who attend to other queries coming from the employees.  Based on the details I had, I decided to go with mind mapping tool to understand the underlying problem  and to gain better insight.

Mind mapping will also allow all the parties involved( employees who are also customers in this case, HR  professionals who are providers and any other party involved) to think from their own perspective of the  underlying problem. Adding the visualization concept to mind mapping would further add the possibility  of arriving at the experiences that they have been going through in a better way. Furthermore, based on  the example of “The Good Kitchen” story I felt that this would help me arrive at an effective design criteria.

Mind mapping process will assist in doing the research, identifying insights and coming with design criteria  so that it will be an input to the “What if” stage. Mind mapping is looking for patterns and insights in a  large quantity of data you collected during your exploration of what is the current reality

Application

A meeting was held with the employees (customers of HR services) and HR professionals(providers) who  was selected for studying this problem. At the onset, they were asked to come up with collages or any  drawings that would best describe their current experience working with HR related services. Then I went  in for the interviewing technique with the pinwheels ready so that I could utilize the benefits of  visualization technique.

Pinwheel for getting more details of the current situation

Most of them had their collages with them ready with them, which facilitated in adding more value to the  exercise. I interviewed them one by one to get more understanding into the problem. With the help of  the pin wheel diagram provide to them, they were able to add their experiences into the petals of the  pinwheel. I then asked them to rate their experiences from 1 to 5 based on the problem which they felt  was most affecting them to the least. I managed to collect the filled pin wheels sheet from most of them.

After the interviewing exercise, we had a workshop and the team was grouped based on the departments  they came from and provided with the sticky notes. The team members were asked to add the difficulties  faced one by one on different sticky notes. Then the next team member was asked to add the difficulties  one by one on different sticky notes. If they had similar problems they would add that as a point to the  existing sticky note.

Then the mind-mapping tool was used in search of patterns and themes and to arrive at the insights

Insight

Based on the mind mapping process, some of the observation was that most of the employees had  problem in getting the service received on time. Some of them did not know whom to contact in HR  whenever they were in need of an HR related service. Some of them were not aware of the HR policies  and procedures. Some mentioned that HR personnel lost the application forms which was in a printed  format. From the HR professional’s perspective, in some cases, they did not have much visibility once the  request went into the IT department for further procedures. Some of the emails were not routed to them;  it resulted in not replying to the requests on time. Then a workshop was conducted and the team

Rate the experiences

HR Experiences of

each personnel

Add the

experiences

members were asked to connect between the various observations as to why this was happening. The  insights like 1) No centralized system to handle employee requests 2) Delay from other departments 3)  Inefficiency in tracking of the employee requests 4) Manual process depended on paper printouts etc   were arrived based on this exercise.

Approach

I believe the approaches used like interviewing, mind mapping, and visualization in stages of “What is”  helped to achieve the insights I had sought. This I felt as a very effective approach. If I had not created the  pinwheel visualization technique, I may not have received as many observations as I got when I used one.  The pinwheel technique assisted in understanding the complex issues faster from the perspective of both  employees and HR personnel. Similarly, the mind mapping process helped me connect the different ideas  and come up with a list of insights with the consensus of everyone in the team. They understood each  other and were able to trace what exactly caused the problem. Mind mapping improved learning,  information recall, productivity, creativity, and more. The team also felt the need to find the solution to  this problem collectively as a team. I believe various techniques/tools could be applied at various phases.  For eg, for the “what is” phase, mind mapping could be used, for “what if” brain storming could be applied,  for “what works”, testing or prototyping could be used and for “what wows”, Learning launch tool could  be applied.

