Talent Management Strategies and Human Resources
Crowd-sourcing Opinions in Real Time Conversations
Problem
How might we understand the lived experience of working from home during the pandemic, what went well, and what were the challenges – in a service with more than 20,000 employees and multiple roles, sites and stakeholders.
Solution
A virtual discovery session to learn from 600+ employees randomly selected to attend
Impact
The Design Lab captured opinions, priorities and experiences of hundreds of staff, including leaders and frontline, in a way that each participant felt heard and respected.
Partners
Talent Management Strategies and Human Resources
The organization wanted to learn how they could continue to support staff and allow flexibility to continue to work from home. With 20,000+ employees who transitioned to home from working within an office, the group wanted to hold multiple small focus groups, but realized that the information they would be able to gather would be limited.
The project was time sensitive as they wanted to be able to bring this information back to executive leadership.
Offerings
Strategic facilitation
Expertise
User interviews
Codesign workshops
Persona development
What we did
The Design Lab suggested to bring together and invite as many people as possible to just 4 workshops. These workshops would be designed to gather information about the lived experience of working during a pandemic, explore the hybrid model of work that was shared by the HR team, and understand staff perception of the suggested models.
“This was an excellent session. I felt heard and appreciated. I enjoyed the lightness of the session: the use of humour, the desire to connect and the feelings of comradery that the session leaders brought.”
How we did it
Using our team’s innovative facilitation models we designed an agenda with a focus on energy, quick pace, and appreciative inquiry. With over 150+ participants for each session, we built breakout spaces to allow all participants opportunities to speak, but also provide their feedback in the chat box if they did not feel comfortable to un-mute themselves. Each breakout space had their own designated facilitator to help guide the conversation and capture the thoughts from the participants.
“Great session, great moderators. Good to feel that the organization organized a focus group to be able to make informed decision and good music before and after the meeting”
Outcomes
We developed a report that highlighted the experiences of over 600 staff, and their needs to continue to work effectively. We surveyed those who participated in the sessions: 86.26% of participants felt heard and 89.89% felt that the conversation around remote/hybrid work was valuable to them.
“Highly impressed with how organized the workshop was and how well informed I was after it was done. I also appreciated our facilitator not forcing us to talk when we didn’t want to in our break groups, but still encouraged all other forms of communication, like typing our comments in the chat box, if we feel like not talking. I think that Design Lab really did a great job. Thank you.”
