Employee Experience by Design: How to Create an Effective EX for Competitive Advantage with Belinda Gannaway — DT101 E75

Belinda Gannaway is the co-author of Employee Experience by Design and the Director at Fathom XP, an employee experience design agency based in the UK. She's also a facilitator and a team and systems coach. Today, we discuss her book, and what's possible when we apply design thinking to orchestrating how people perform and produce results in organizations.

Listen to learn about:

>> Using design thinking to create better employee experiences
>> How our relationship with the work we do has changed
>> Helping organizational leadership to understand the why of employee experience design
>> The way the COVID-19 pandemic is changing how organizations think about their employees
>> The drastic ways experience design and employee experience design have changed due to the pandemic
>> How to discover what matters to your employees
>> Three key principles of employee experience design
>> The future of work and employee experience's role in that future

Our Guest

Belinda Gannaway is an employee experience design practitioner, facilitator and team coach. She is co-author of Employee Experience by Design: How to Create an Effective EX for Competitive Advantage, published in 2021 by Kogan Page.

Strategy director of EX design consultancy FathomXP, Belinda has been working in and around organizational culture for many years. Her interest in culture began early when she worked as a journalist in the UK Houses of Parliament – a 1,000-year-old institution.

Belinda's career has covered the worlds of journalism, PR and marketing, digital transformation and culture change. She has worked with some of the world's best-known organizations, including LEGO, Jaguar Land Rover, Diageo and the International Olympic Committee.

Show Highlights

[01:08] Dawan talks about the relevance of Employee Experience by Design in today's pandemic work world.
[01:58] Belinda talks about what sparked her and her co-author, Emma Bridger, to write the book, and how our relationship with work has been changing, even before the pandemic.
[02:33] Employees have become the consumers of the workplace.
[03:01] The two things Belinda and Emma focused on when writing the book.
[03:52] Democratizing great employee experience.
[05:03] How Belinda's background as a political journalist helped during the writing process.
[06:09] The two ways design thinking is being used in employee experience design.
[07:11] The similarity of experience Belinda discovered was happening across many companies in different countries.
[09:18] Starting from the desire to create better experiences for our employees.
[10:23] Adding in a third diamond, focused on scoping, to the Double Diamond model.
[10:38] The starting point: what does employee experience mean for this organization?
[11:50] The next step is asking: where are we falling short?
]14:31] The connections and inter-relationships between employee experience, employee performance, and the bottom line.
[14:51] Organizational focus on employee experience is often around talent attraction and retention.
[15:38] How the pandemic has changed this focus.
[16:14] The link between a great employee experience and a great customer experience.
[17:30] Writing the book as the pandemic unfolded.
[17:56] Organizations' greater focus on the wellbeing of their employees.
[18:22] Empathy as the "word of the year."
[18:37] Experience design and employee experience design have changed drastically because of the pandemic.
[21:01] Belinda offers advice on how organizations can use the book to start the work of looking at their employee experience and changing it for the better.
[21:20] The book uses design thinking and positive psychology in its approach.
[21:49] Start with a conversation around "tell me about your best experience at work."
[22:02] The book explains how to set up this conversation in different ways, as needed.
[24:21] The top ideas Belinda hopes people will take from the book and put into practice.
[25:07] Three key principles of employee experience design.
[27:51] Dawan and Belinda talk about the value of having an experimental mindset.
[32:04] Belinda asks Dawan why he doesn't use the word "coach/ing" when he talks about his work.
[34:16] What's next for employee experience and the future of work.
[39:17] How employees as consumers of the workplace have the potential to change the ethos of business.
[42:03] Belinda shares her go-to tool when she is working with organizations and their employee experience design.
[44:47] Fluid Hive's resources for those wanting to learn and practice design thinking.

Links

Belinda on Twitter
Belinda on LinkedIn
Designing a meaningful employee experience: An interview with Belinda Gannaway
How to launch or re-energize your employee experience approach
FathomXP

Book Recommendation

Employee Experience by Design: How to Create an Effective EX for Competitive Advantage, by Emma Bridger and Belinda Gannaway

Design Thinking 101 Episodes You Might Like

Building Design Capacity + Measuring Design Value + Designing Studios with Doug Powell — DT101 E16
Humble Design Leadership + Design Agency and Experience Design Evolution with Aleksandra Melnikova — DT101 E33
Designing Your Team + Teams in Design Education + Coaching Design Teams with Mary Sherwin and David Sherwin — DT101 E49

Resources

Download Fluid Hive's Innovation Shield — a guide to avoiding innovation traps by asking 9 of Fluid Hive's Design Thinking Questions

Innovation Smart Start Webinar — Learn to Ask Like a Designer and take your innovation projects from frantic to focused by working smart from the start.

Fluid Hive: Learn — A growing collection of courses, webinars, and articles for people expanding their design thinking, service design, and human-centered design skills – people who want to think and solve like a designer.