Reflection – Visualisation

Challenge

I work in human resources for a professional services firm that supports a large global consulting  organisation. We have been facing a significant talent crunch in some departments and also a problem  of insufficient mobility opportunities in others. The organisation has an internal mobility policy called  Internal Job Postings (IJP) that opens up jobs to current employees. Employees look at the options  available, apply online, walk the qualification process, and then are selected or rejected. Our struggle  was that we had very few employees availing these opportunities and yet complaining about the lack of  them. My project was to understand the causes of the low participation of the employees in the process  and even lower conversion amongst those who participated.

Selection

I decided to use visualization to build a journey map to further understand the underlying causes or  challenges to the process. I used visualization because I wanted to get the stakeholders and participants  in the process to review the information, that I had collected, together and pose questions and  clarifications which would then be used to design suggestions for changing/improving the process.

Application

To create the visual I began by identifying my various stakeholders who are involved. In a team of 4 we  ran interviews with stakeholders individually to capture their role in the process, their challenges, and  the changes they would expect for the process to work differently. I also did an external scan to identify  things that other organisations were doing to improve the success of the IJP process. Once I was  confident that we had data that I needed to proceed to look at the problem from all angles, I started to  build the visual of the process. I decided that I didn’t just want to highlight problems but actually  encapsulate thoughts, comments, suggestions, from stakeholders on one single page for leadership to  deliberate on.

Below is an image of the visualization that I created to help leadership understand the current process  and the experience of the stakeholders.

I then presented this to our leadership group (10 participants) and let them walk around the whole  image. I provided them with post it notes so they could write whatever thoughts came up as they read  the whole image. I wrote down all notes as well as post its and then ran a theme analysis to organize the  thoughts. This helped to start the brainstorming process around suggestions and potential changes to  the program.

Insights & Approach

As a result of the visualization and the joint exploration, we realized that the problem lay not only in the  process execution and executors, but in the actual policy, our way of measuring success or failure, our  culture and behaviours that the organisation was exhibiting when it came to recommending and  releasing staff for other roles, as well as the outdated technology that we were using. As a group, they  agreed to discuss this in their own groups and collate suggestions that the larger HR group could then  implement.

We have since compiled a list of 15 thoughts that the process team has picked up for running PoCs.

My organisational leadership was also very impressed by the clarity with which the exploratory  information had been provided and has recommended that we use this approach for other exploration  and investigation projects that the HR team runs.

