…Employee Engagement Week 1

Posted on July 8, 2013     Leave a Comment

Apologise this is a late post. Been trying to gather my thoughts from the last few weeks.

Week 1

And Go

So begins the final major project. The proposal has been drafted and sent in. The reading has begun and the subject is…

What would a Service Design approach look like to increase employee engagement?

Better late than never.

I have been reading through some of the literature around the Macleod Report 2009, touchpoint journal articles and The Service Design Book by

Add in all the other notes from the weeks

Add picture of my plan.

17th June

Looking at Dale Carnegie pages http://www.dalecarnegie.com/employee-engagement/engaged-employees-infographic?keycode=twitter&utm_content=buffer81286&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer some interesting white papers put on hold

Can Yammer be classed as an employee engagement platform?

PLAN for this week

– Immerse myself in Macleod Report and start producing portraits of the WHO and WHAT

– Investigate Zappos case study

– Pick another two case studies

– Look at Engaged book

– Look at rest of touchpoints book for cases and strategies

– Read Service Design Book

Investigating MACLEOD Report – Using the Dan Roam Who method

First sweep notes

Meet Nina Grunfield

18th June

Good chats with Peter and Michel about google glass

Books

Rebecca MacKinnon

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Consent-Networked-Rebecca-MacKinnon/dp/0465063756/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=1AOKFWP8Q43AL&coliid=I3NRMOUIFF04B9

Nicholas Carr

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Shallows-Internet-Changing-Remember/dp/1848872275/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=1AOKFWP8Q43AL&coliid=IUUVU5EZ68CP5

Jason Lanier

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Who-Owns-Future-Jaron-Lanier/dp/1846145228/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_3

Did a concept map of the employee engagement from a macro view.

Had a tutorial with Paul (photos)

20th June

To contact the SD network and Design Thinkers Network

Reading Service design book by Ben Reason 

Yammer use as a case study

Street car case

Then focus on dyson induction process – making a dyson

Then do I focus on the team culture. What is that about? Do you look at leaders or do you look for traits or how do you make this work with the company culture. These are some of the focused questions needed

Use three core service map on p29

Look at virgin airways design with inflight teams

Fish tale book

21st June

Connected on linkedin with service design UK Network and found a discussion very similar to my thesis.

Idea on focus

Objective 1 start by creating a service blueprint from Macleod report.

Objective 2 – create a Meetup employee engagement group. Using rave as a base and use Meetup, eventbrite or other planning too

Objective 3 – to have created a community actively creating new solutions and testing out at group meet ups.

Culture infographic http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-06-13/office-cultures-a-global-guide#r=nav-r-graphic

Some American blogs

http://switchandshift.com/

http://www.greatplacetowork.com/blog-carnival-entries/2039-future-organizations-will-be-do-gooders

22nd June

See picture of sketch around a practice workshop to run through decisions

Draw + Decision + coach = experiential learning and learning a skill and experience

…Employee Engagement Week 2

Posted on July 8, 2013     Leave a Comment

Research Week 2 – 24/06/13

Research WHAT WOULD A SERVICE DESIGN APPROACH LOOK LIKE TO INCREASE EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT?

I will update the first two weeks shortly. I have been getting my mind into employee engagement.

Coming into Week 3 of the my final project, my point of view was that I needed to have a better understanding of the literature around employee engagement and I needed to start identifying service design tools and a process to experiment with. I also wanted to refine my research proposal.

Four items for the week

–        Read about employee engagement (Zappos book and Macleod Report)

–        Finish reading Service Design book by Ben Reason

–        Identify service design tools to be used in employee engagement

–        Re-write research proposal to be more focused

So first of all I kept reading the service design book by Reason et al. Which has been a great book to piece together a lot of the elements of service design and almost create a process for Service Design. There are not that many actual service design books out in the market. So this has been a great help in two aspects so far.

1. I identified that I need to create a visual Service proposition between the enterprise and the employee. What is the promise and what is the value of the enterprise.

Service Proposition Diagram

2. I identified that a service blueprint mock-up would be key to piece together the type of experiences of employees (see mock up photo below).

Service Blueprint mockup

A number of useful insights were also discussed

–  Categorising types of experience (TASK, COMMERCIAL and LIFE P132)

These then had four categories inside them. User experience (interactions with tech) , Customer experience (experiences with retail brands), Service provider experience (what it is like on the other side), Human Experience (emotional effect of services)

I would suggest that out the most important for my project would be service provider and human experience.

I feel at the heart of the employee engagement debate is the issue around the types of experience an employee has with a company. Task, Commercial and Life (experiences that shapes our wider quality of life). Maybe they are satisfied with Task and Commerical even though they can be somewhat ethically be questioned (eg Enron). The life experience is an interesting area, some companies like Google have upped the ante by giving emloyees all the things they need to stay, however does this improve the Life experience and produce greater productivity or do we all need to switch off at some point?

It would be worth looking for insights in the employee engagement literature to see if there is opportunity in the touchpoints around life experience. As in the Macleod report it is said that one of the pillars is around employees needing meaning from there work. (P133)

Human Experience

“a lack of attention to the human experience could be much more damaging and permanent” (P136-137) The human experience contains huge range of emotions as well as feelings. This resonated with me for two reasons, one service design is about creating human experiences which are best for the customer and if its either humans or technology its needs to have been thought through with a human experience in mind. For example calling a company via telephone. They have evolved from machine voices to having human voices for the options. I still don’t find them the most engaging.

TIME

CONSIDERING TIME AS AN OBJECT of DESIGN – Objects of design are experiences over time (P138). This was a point I read which made me step back, when you are designing services and touchpoints you designing with time included. Sometimes in the past with internal and external services the touchpoints for a service have been developed in isolation and the “holistic view” has not been taken into consideration thus one or more of the touchpoint doesn’t fit or feels wrong or the timing/expectation they create is not right.

Blueprinting

IDEA and Action – Do a blueprint and proposition maps. Using Velcro strips and use that to interview people first and companies to assess their perceptions of the employee engagement. This was an initial method to test out employees views.

During the later parts of the week I was reading about Zappos values and employee engagement activities, Tony Schwartz book and the Macleod report.

TO DO

– Find evidence on hypothesis

– Develop service proposition map.

PHOTOS of WEEK

A screen grab of mind map being produced

Service Blueprint mockup