Building Empathetic Workplaces

As Service design evolves and becomes the norm, more will be demanded from it in terms of the value business and people get from the resulting services. A possible angle to explore is how services impact on people’s wellbeing. This, which may sound unnecessary now, will become increasingly important as the way to stand out in the market and differentiate from the crowd, not only for consumers but also as an employee strategy.

Using service design for improving employee’s well being, it could be an interesting approach for those companies that are struggling with finding ways to reduce their cost of acquisition, retention, but also for those interested in increasing diversity. The present talk will present a particular case on how looking at the employee lifecycle holistically bears fruits both for the employer and the employee.

In particular, the present talk will show how it is possible to improve women’s wellbeing and career development at the workplace by developing services on a particular moment that has a huge impact on both women’s wellbeing and their ability to fully explore their potential as professionals: motherhood. The talk will also present other moments on the employee’s life cycle that companies can consider applying this approach to make their companies empathetic workplaces and what it takes to companies walk this new approach and be successful. This talk will also give the audience a better idea on how different the employee experience could be when instead of considered a mere consecution of steps - onboard, perform and offboard -, it is designed holistically to create the conditions for employees grow as individuals and as professional.

Finally, in the present presentation, the audience will get a better understanding of how different it is to design for employee experience versus customer experience.