Cheat Sheet to Improve Employee Experience. Fast.

No matter what challenge you are facing, ie attracting employees back to the office, improving the speed and easing the pain of employee on-boarding, rolling out a new feature, or even retiring and old system, experience strategies like personas and journey mapping can offer you an illuminated path forward.

But mind the gap. It's really easy to waste A LOT of time building personas and journey maps. Believe me. I've done it.

Don't Admire the Data

About 10 years ago, when I was an IT leader at a large financial services firm, I led the employee experience of our migration from Lotus Notes to Exchange Online and the rollout of Microsoft 365. (some of you can feel my pain)

In the lead up to the migration and roll-out I spent 4 months working with a consulting group to develop a personal playbook. Together, we interviewed hundreds of employees, surveyed thousands, and produced a 64 page powerpoint deck with 10 distinct personas, each with a vast amount of data.

Let me be clear, these personas were fascinating. The problem was, they weren't very actionable. Not to mention, after 4 months of effort to produce them, they were already becoming stale. Technology and consumer behaviors wait for no one.

Cheat Sheet to Valuable Experience Design

When I joined Gartner , I began to study Michael Chiu and Jason Daigler 's work on customer experience to see how experience strategies could be adapted to fit employee experience challenges. Over the last 12 months, I have been helping Gartner clients and conference attendees zoom out to see the five elements of the process, which if not deeply admired, could yield a valuable outcome in 90 minutes or less.

Step One: Put On Their Glasses

I want you to imagine putting on someone else's glasses. What's the first thing most of us do? We describe the distortion! We say "Oh my, I didn't know you were so blind!"

The second thing we do? Either consciously or unconsciously we to try to correct the distortion. Our brain flexes our eye muscle to adapt our eyes to see the way WE see but through THEIR lens. But that's the wrong thing to do. Instead we should allow ourselves to see through their lens even if it seems distorted to us.

For employees we can apply the lens of being a remote hire vs an onsite hire. Or, the difference between being an early career individual and a mid-career individual. There are many other lenses we can apply such as, the nature of the work they do, how they learn best, their personal goals and ambitions.

We call this thinking like the employee not about them.

Step Two: Walk In Their Shoes

Now I want you to imagine putting on your spouses glasses, while sitting at their bedside, then go through their morning routine. Did you laugh imaging trying to navigate the stairs in progressives? Did you shudder when you imagined trying to drive their route to work?

For employees this could look like their first day at work, or maybe, their first day coming to the office in a long time.

What are they expecting? What questions do they have? What are they feeling? What are they interacting with?

A few weeks ago I visited the Gartner office for the first time in my nearly 3 years with the company. My colleagues who go more frequently casually mentioned an app I would need to use to get into the office. But it wasn't until I was standing outside in the cold, trying to find the email with the app name, download the app, navigate the 2-factor authentication, and finally figure out how to use the app with the door sensor. 10 minutes later I was in. Could my persona have helped anticipate my journey?

We must allow ourselves to take the journey with their lens if we hope to discover their experience.

Step Three: Diagnose Their Journey

We have arrived at the part of the exercise that most people love - diagnosing the problems! There are hundreds of diagnostics you can run on experiences but we've found five that will help you deliver impactful results fast. Effort, pain, waiting, questions, and errors.

Step Four: Answers and Observations

It's not at all difficult to imagine the kinds of errors we might make with our spouses glasses on, can we really tell the difference between the OJ and the milk in the fridge door? Or the pain! How many stubbed toes or smashed knees between the bed and the back door?

If you diagnose my experience visiting the office, you could find pain points, wait times, effort, and questions.

Step Five: Solutions

Solutions is where we all want to end up. And we need to get here fast by applying a MVP and iterate mindset. Solutions come in three flavors, immediate, improved, and innovative.

The best way to think about possible solutions is to allow yourself to ideate without boundaries and then bucket them by cost in time (and money) and impact. Goldilocks rule: If your immediate solution is right-sized, it would make an immediate if only short-term positive impact and you would have the authority to execute it without approval.

Let's say we're ideating ways to make it easier for new hires to learn how to use our tools?

• Simple and immediate: revise outdated training materials and include them in a new hire email.
• Improved: Run a design thinking workshop to identify where?the complexity of learning and setup can be improved
• Innovate: Pilot an AI companion for on-demand support throughout the onboarding process

Solutions is where I wanted to end up when I spent 4 months building my persona playbook.

Could you make it from the bedside to the office in someone else's glasses?

Or better yet, have you ever used journey maps or personas before?