Growing up as a child, a lot of things intrigued me. Top on the list was food, my special stones (aka pebbles), and caring for people as a nurse; even while I wasn’t a fan of medication and injections. I think the one thing that made my siblings laugh was the fact that I remembered longer sentences over simple ones. For example, remembering “….the difference is clear” rather than simply “7-up” was something I was endlessly teased about as a child.
It was fun to explore and understand how the universe worked all together. So it was only natural for me to grow and learn within the world of natural sciences. Isn’t it amazing how simple fundamental laws of science can be applied to help us understand some basic concepts of our day-to-day lives? Simply using Newton’s second law of motion, we know that F= ma. (Where F = Force, m = Mass and a = Acceleration). In order to find a, the formula changes to a = F/m. We can, therefore, make an inference and say that the rate at which an individual excels “accelerates” in life is largely dependent on their will “inert force” to succeed as well as their ability to gather the necessary skills “mass” to enhance their craft.
I believe that’s how technology has metamorphosed over time. Our need to make our day-to-day lives better and efficient has brought about innovative technological solutions that we’ve come to know today. I’m really delighted to see a lot of these technological innovations taking place in Africa that has influenced multiple sectors such as banking (M-Pesa in Kenya), entertainment (IrokoTV in Nigeria), agriculture (SysComp in Ghana, Pula in Kenya), healthcare (GiftedMom in Cameroon, MedTrucks in Morocco), energy (Simusolar in Tanzania), etc.
These innovations help us grow internally as people, while simultaneously highlighting the potential that lies within the African continent for investors. Like Emmanuel Delaveau (General Partner at Partech) puts it, “This digitalization of traditional areas of the economy is very intriguing. We consider Africa to be one of the most exciting opportunities for the years to come”. We’ve also seen the emergence of multiple tech hubs that are helping to support businesses in Africa grow and to create avenues where young people can build technology products as it evolves. Martin Heidegger summarizes the essence of Technology to it being a way that we encounter entities generally, including nature, ourselves and everything around us. It goes beyond something that we make, it’s a state of mind that transforms over time.
This is what fascinates me about working in a technology company, especially as a Human Resource professional. Working within the tech space exposes you to multiple opportunities to make day-to-day processes easier and more efficient for both our clients as well as our employees. Before we walk away thinking not everyone is tech-savvy, the beauty of technology is that it comes in various forms. Simply leveraging Google Forms, Excel, Google Sheets, etc, does wonders to our turn-around time and service delivery!
The world is constantly changing, which in turn also affects work and office culture. There’s never been a better time for us in HR to be prepared for the future of work than now. We need to be more creative in the way we proffer solutions to the problems that come up over time. One way to better understand the concept of creative problem solving is through the principle of design thinking.
What is Design Thinking?
The Design Thinking concept has been around for a while and has gained popularity in the past decade. It initially became prominent in the mid-20th century as Designers began using it to think about how to enhance the end user’s experience. By the 1960s, more people who were designing homes, consumer goods and technology started using this concept more by making the users the center of their design process flow.
In essence, Design Thinking is a creative, solution-based approach to problem-solving which has the user/people at the center of its process flow. One of the most recent trends is how Design Thinking can be used as a tool to understand and improve the customer experience of HR. It can be used in all aspects of HR; from sourcing, attracting and identifying potential talent to retaining and developing key people into greater assets for any organization. As HR Leader and Coach, ‘Lara Yeku puts it; “HR needs a “human-centered” approach to respond and transform our talent challenges into “possible employee experience”.”
This might seem like an uphill task but the beauty of this process is that it is based on your current state and helps you plan for future work. Most importantly, being innovative is a skill that can be nurtured. So we get better with practice and experience.
To make this easier, we’ll walk through the key phases of Design Thinking and run through a basic example for us to get a better understanding of how to apply this process to solve problems in creative and innovative ways.
1. Understand:
- Empathize: This is the first stage of design thinking which starts with observing, engaging and understanding the needs of the people involved in the problem-solving process. It helps you build a connection with the people (“end-user”) on a psychological and emotional level. Here, the basic thing involved is listening to understand (without any bias or assumptions) and not to respond. Understand the different personas involved.
- Define: Within this stage, we try to find a way to identify the problem statement. Here, we work to make sense of the information that we gathered from the previous stage. Key things that we’ll want to note include: Are there any patterns that you can observe? What are the blockers or difficulties that our end users are facing? What is the main problem that we need to solve?
2. Explore:
- Ideate: After we’ve listened to our end-users and identified what the problem statements might be, we then brainstorm to identify possible creative solutions to the problem. At the end of this stage, we should be able to identify possible ideas to explore. There are no limits to the number of creative ideas/ solutions that we may come up with.
- Prototype: In this phase, the solution can be enhanced, revamped, established or rejected. Our goal is to validate the solutions and ideas which have been identified.
3. Materialize:
- Test: Share these prototypes or pilot the possible scenarios with the end-users to try out. The goal here is to get feedback in order to help reframe the identified solutions to make them better. This could also mean going back to the prototyping or all the way back to the empathize stage.
- Implement: This phase is the full-blown roll-out stage where all the end users get to use the product or work within the new process that has been drawn up. Don’t stop here, for this is a continuous process flow that could give rise to more problems which will need us to find creative solutions to help resolve.
This might seem very academic so let us walk through an example to help us understand how we can use Design Thinking:
Aminu is an HR Operations Officer within a Technology company. Employees have reached out to indicate that they do not fully understand the company’s leave policy and what it entails. Thus, they are unable to effectively scheduling their annual leave days. Aminu has just learned about how Design Thinking works and seeks to explore how to resolve these concerns that have been shared and does the following:
1. Empathize — Aminu works with the members of his team to conduct a focus group session with key members of each department. Within this forum, Aminu and the HR team are able to listen and itemize the identified problems.
2. Define — Aminu and his colleague come together to define the key problem statements.
- Employees need a place where all the policies are stored and easily accessible to all without the need to contact HR.
- Employees would like the policy to be succinct and updated to meet the current realities of the business.
3. Ideate — The team brainstorms to identify the following solutions:
- Have a list of all the company’s policies on Google drive and link them to a sheet or tracker that all employees can access;
- Create a simple intranet which will house all the policies;
- Send out monthly reminders to all employees on where to access and view all the policies;
- Review the policy to make the information clear and direct. Highlight the key information that is necessary for employees to understand how the leave days are allocated and how they can utilize them. Move all the additional/ nice to have information into an appendix section;
- Include a table of content, appropriate headers, and section dividers to help make readability easier for the end-user;
- Carry out a road-show that uses jingles and a short video that highlights the key aspects of the leave policy.
4. Prototype — Aminu then works with his team members as well as the members of Technology and Internal Communications teams to explore potential technology applications that can be used to make this process more efficient and the language of the policy more “reader-friendly” for the employees.
5. Test — Once a new draft policy has been created and possible technology tools have been identified by Aminu and his team, it is shared with a controlled group of employees to review and provide feedback.
6. Implement — After the feedback has been obtained and necessary changes have been made to the policy and the mode of accessibility, this is rolled out to all employees. This could bring about more issues as well as great wins for the team. So we’ll have to start again from the empathize phase to see how to tackle the next amazing challenge ahead!
Now that we’ve helped Aminu and his team save the day as HR heroes do, it’s time for us to reflect and explore ways to enhance the customer experience for our employees, clients, and stakeholders.
A recent article published by Forbes indicates that the future of work will evolve in 5 ways; positions will be fluid, work-force would be decentralized, motivation to work will be more than paychecks, lifelong learning will be desired and technology will augment human’s jobs.
In view of this article, it’s clear that Design Thinking will be a very powerful toolkit that takes a more customer/people-centric approach to effective service delivery, and focuses on creating exceptional customer and employee experience.
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