Context – My Organization

I work in a worldwide corporation in Human Resources department. In our country affiliate  every month we hire 30-60 people. New hires join various functions on different levels of our  organization. Our business language is English however we speak 20+ national languages and  operate as pretty diversified company.

Challenge

1. New Hire’s Perspective

How to make the experience of a New Hire seamless and pleasant starting from the moment of  accepting the job offer by the candidate until the moment of his/her first days at work?

How to design initial on-boarding program to make it possibly engaging, inspirational  informative and easy to comprehend? How to create the New Hire’s experience that could be  ultimately summarized as the following perception:

“Wow! This is great and well organized company. I have made the right choice by joining it!”

2. Hiring Manager Perspective

How to make Hiring Manager experience seamless and pleasant so that all that is required for  New Hire to become operational as of Day 1 would be ready before that date? (e.g. work place,  desk, IT equipment, respective information systems access rights, etc.).

How to involve Hiring Manager in the initial on-boarding program so that he/she recognizes  benefits of this involvement for him/herself and his/her team?

Selection (all course modules, the whole cycle of: What is? What if? What wows? What  works?)

We decided to select full-fledged Design Thinking methodology to map the experience of both  New Hire and Hiring Manager in order to learn about their current pain points, to define core  problems and to decide which of them and how will be addressed by company in a new  structured way.

Application

We have established cross-functional project team consisting of:

1. just hired employees,

2. hiring managers from all functions

as well as HR and IT functions representatives.

We have also identified a groups of other people who were and will be interviewed by project  team at different stages of our initiative. I took on the role of this project lead. So far, we have  run 5 day design thinking workshop that enabled us to:

1. Clearly define problems that we want to address  2. Come up with the first prototypes of solutions for both New Hires and Hiring Managers  3. Initially validate our prototypes with both New Hires and Hiring Managers

Currently we are getting ready for another Design Thinking sprint (workshop) to brainstorm and  validate what (in our corporate reality) will be feasible as the ultimate solution that we could  propose to Hiring Managers, especially when it comes to developing a software that would  simplify the process of requesting for all necessary artefacts that are mandatory to make New  Hire operational as of Day 1.

Insights

During 5 day workshop we have realized how effective and very collaborative Design Thinking  method is. Every participant could contribute and everyone was respected as equal contributor,  regardless of his/her role or position in the company. Diversity of the team (achieved by  involving representatives of various functions as well as by inviting people from different levels  of the organization) enabled us to identify pain points we could not think of beforehand.  Collaborative form of the workshop also naturally instilled engagement of its participants and  created very positive energy and boost. Workshop participants also gained individually as they  all stated that they have learned a lot for themselves.

Application

As a project leader I have realized how important is the role of Design Thinking workshop  facilitator (note: the role was not held by me). Listening skills as well as ability to be transparent  for workshop participants (which means mostly helping the team to achieve however without

imposing on team members facilitator’s own views) are indeed crucial. Hence, for the next  workshop we will invest more time to prepare facilitators to their roles before we go for the  workshop.

Also many workshop participants met each other on the workshop for the first time. We did not  apply any “ice-breakers” so that team members could get to know each other first. Next time,  before going for workshop I would first organize a small informal team building, e.g. in a form  of going together for lunch or dinner.

