Workforce strategy for a global pharma company

How we designed the post-covid employee experience using human-centered design

Illustration of a person working on their laptop at home

Illustration of a map with various pins depicting international office locations

The path forward

The client was defining their strategy for post-pandemic ways of working. Headquarters released high-level guidance, but it was left up to each country to develop and implement a strategy tailored to their local circumstances and culture. The scope of this project was the US, where ~8,000 employees have been either working remotely full-time, on-site full-time, or a hybrid of both during the pandemic.

Our challenge

While it was clear the future would be a hybrid work environment for most, key decision points included how much flexibility to provide and how expectations would differ by role, while also considering equity, culture, and job nature.

A phased, employee-centric approach

The project was split into three phases:
1. Research and synthesize strategic goals and employee needs
2. Ideate potential solutions
3. Define and prioritize initiatives on roadmap

At the end of the project, the client had a comprehensive Future of Work (FOW) strategy defined in a collaborative effort with global leaders across the firm. This included:

A roadmap to implement 33 work packages across 7 initiatives, including key activities, target outcomes, level of impact and effort, and dependencies
A FOW strategy aligned to the client’s future state needs and business objectives, including a mission statement and 6 guiding principles

We presented the strategy to executive leadership and a follow-on project was approved to begin piloting and implementing their new future of work strategy.

Understand the workforce

We needed to gather a variety of perspectives to inform the future of work strategy and developed topics and prompts for each stakeholder group.

Designed and facilitated 3 listening sessions with 1,500 employees using an AI-powered survey tool
Interviewed 15+ leaders across business units and locations
Conducted 2 deep dive focus groups with the technology and crisis management teams

Illustrates the level of confidence employees had in their ability to be successful in the future ways of working, segmented by current mode of working

Shows participant responses when asked to imagine how many days per week they are having face-to-face interactions or meetings in 2022, also segmented by current mode of working

Synthesize findings

We identified 5 problem statements based on the research conducted, including the need to reimagine collaboration spaces and technology to create a seamless experience for both on-site and off-site meeting attendees and the need to foster a cohesive culture that encourages physical and mental wellbeing. I led the development of 5 personas to represent a unique set of employee experiences for consideration in the future design of work activities, workforce composition, and physical workplaces.

An outline of the personas I developed based on user research, spanning a variety of working experiences

Ideation

Our team facilitated four labs with the client to brainstorm solutions addressing each of the five problem statements. I designed the overall structure and content of the lab and led facilitation of several modules. My role was to guide participants through several interactive activities to identify unique needs and potential solutions from the perspectives of the personas. We also explored trends, developed a future of work vision and guiding principles, and developed a roadmap of prioritized initiatives to implement the strategy.

Snapshot of a the MURAL board participants used to prioritize initiatives and plot them on a timeline.

Reflections

This was the first time I championed a strategic design approach with a client that was not familiar with design thinking. I learned how to better articulate the value proposition for using design thinking and user empathy to design employee experiences.

If I were to do this project again, I would advocate for strategic design more consistently throughout the process as we engaged with different

If I were to do this project again, I would advocate for strategic design more consistently throughout the process as we engaged with different stakeholders. I would also reconsider attaching unnecessary demographic information to personas so that participants in the process could better empathize with the different employee experiences in the organization. We found that participants struggled to step out of their own shoes and relate to a persona, especially if the persona was tagged as being in a different department from their own.

stakeholders. I would also reconsider attaching unnecessary demographic information to personas so that participants in the process could better empathize with the different employee experiences in the organization. We found that participants struggled to step out of their own shoes and relate to a persona, especially if the persona was tagged as being in a different department from their own.