Fish Food: Episode 641 - Innovating employee experience in the age of AI
EX innovation in the age of AI, frontier firms, Meta's AI app, cognitive debt, and brand building in a fragmented media world
This week’s provocation: EX innovation and service-design principles in the age of AI
I was lucky enough to give the keynote at the CIPD Change Management conference this week and one of the speakers there referenced how they’d used change personas to help deal with the variety of different responses to a change initiative. It reminded me of a fundamental principle which I’ve always stuck to when I’ve worked with HR and change teams and one that I think we’re at risk of losing in the AI-will-solve-everything gold rush.
Everything we know about the world of work is about to be upended - with AI infiltrating every part of the business and a near-to-mid term future where AI agents will be working alongside FTEs we need a different type of organisation design, to understand the jagged edge of AI adoption (PDF), to develop strategies for machine-human collaboration and AI literacy fast, but more than anything we need to take a humanistic approach to engaging staff on this journey and not leaving people behind or disengaged, disenfranchised and disenchanted. The current feeling of uncertainty is very real and is unlikely to go away anytime soon.
One of the delights of being a generalist is the ability to make connections across different types of work that I do. Apropos of this I’ve found that service design principles and tools can be a rich and undervalued source of inspiration and innovation in employee experience (EX). And there’s a particular reason why. Amazon have long talked about starting with the customer and ‘working backwards’. A key part of why they do this, is to bake in customer-centricity to everything that they do right from the beginning. And it also ensures that teams are not making assumptions about how to solve problems for customers, and that they are balancing business and customer needs throughout (this is ‘outside in’ thinking).
It’s remarkably easy when you’re designing services to start with the business needs, focus on the business benefits and solve the challenges in ways that make most sense for the business (this is ‘inside-out’ thinking). In doing this we risk forgetting about designing in ways that take account of HOW customers want to solve problems or achieve outcomes. We make assumptions. We do stuff that makes no sense for customers. We end up with nonsensical systems, journeys and interfaces. Scott Brinker once called this being ‘dangerously efficient’. It’s efficient for the business but not for the customer. And god knows there’s enough of that around.
For CX (customer experience) we can substitute EX. When we design employee experiences and journeys we are at significant risk of making some pretty big assumptions about how staff want to do their best work, the concerns they might have, the questions they need answers to, how they want to solve problems and achieve outcomes, the reasons they are resisting change. So ‘working backwards’ is helpful in balancing the needs of the business whilst not leaving employees behind, and as AI reimagines the workplace this is only going to become more important.
There are some useful techniques which bring service design thinking into employee experience innovation.
Personas: Staff personas can be based on role, tenure, life stage, aspirations, and/or challenges, and provide a good foundation for understanding unique needs around onboarding, learning, collaboration or change. It prevents everything being a one-size-fits-all solution
Jobs-to-be-done: I find it particularly useful to get teams to work back from functional needs (fundamental goals) and emotional needs (how staff want problems solved, what constitutes a good or poor experience, gains and pains, what they value, how people feel). Even using foundational CX tools like the Value Proposition Canvas helps define EX in a much more nuanced way, especially when done against specific employee personas.
Using this canvas is a real flip of thinking from the way that most HR teams approach EX design. It surfaces latent requirements, expectations and goals and forces you to work back from real needs.
Employee journey mapping: understanding functional and emotional needs (alongside other criteria like sources of influence and information) through a range of employee journeys from onboarding to development to change journeys. This helps us to avoid employees feeling disconnected from strategies, leadership decisions or new technologies but also to better handle change. The speaker at the conference mentioned that people resist loss rather than change, which is a great way of framing the kind of support people often require.
These simple techniques tailor solutions to real human needs, help identify pain points and moments that matter, anchor innovation in outcomes not systems, surface hidden challenges and the emotional side of change and aligns solutions to both business and employee needs. With the tsunami of change that is about to happen in EX due to AI we should, above everything, avoid making assumptions about what employees really care about and design experiences that bring them on the journey in inclusive ways. And the only way to do that is to truly understand what they need.
Rewind and catch up:
On AI model collapse and the era of experience
Is it worth learning how to prompt?
Being more intentional in the age of AI
Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash
If you do one thing this week…
Buried amongst the expected AI-will-change-everything narrative in this new Microsoft research report is the fascinating stat that employees are interrupted an average of 275 times daily - context switching is a real and growing problem. As well as acknowledging how business demands are outpacing human capacity, the report also contains a useful look at how AI agents will impact the org chart (three stages: human with assistant, human-agent teams, human-led agent operated), a look at human/agent ratios, and the shift to becoming an ‘agent boss’.
Another fun fact from the report - there’s a 122% increase in the number of edits in powerpoint in the 10 minutes before a meeting compared to the 3 hours before. We’ve all been there.
Links of the week
Meta is launching a standalone AI assistant app (to compete more directly with ChatGPT), attempting to leverage the years of data it has on its users
‘Where technical debt for an organisation is “the implied cost of additional work in the future resulting from choosing an expedient solution over a more robust one”, cognitive debt is where you forgo the thinking in order just to get the answers, but have no real idea of why the answers are what they are.’ I liked John Willshire’s framing of a topic I’ve been writing about for a while
Related - this was a thought-provoking post from Gianni Giacomelli on how GenAI can help with problem exploration (and avoiding climbing the wrong hill)
An interesting deck here (PDF) from the UK Department of Work and Pensions on the lessons learned from the (less than successful) implementation of the Universal Credit System. Strong parallels in this with what I talk about in a lot of my leadership workshops - empowered teams, outcomes not outputs, agile governance, evidence-based decision-making, test and learn. (HT Tom Loosemore)
Wow. TikTok users now average 35 hours a week
A couple of other useful reports - one on where we’re at with GenAI and marketing from Signal 42 (reg reqd), and one from Meta on Gen Z and building brands via niches, building on the themes articulated well by Tom Roach on brand building in a world of creative fragmentation (HT Zoe Scaman for that one)
‘What I hear in so many people’s anguished LinkedIn posts is a disconnect between the world they thought they were in versus the one they actually are. They sound aghast that the jobs, companies, and industries that were supposed to provide both meaning and security haven’t kept up their end of the bargain’. Gosh. This essay from Rosie Spinks on finding a new source of security other than your job is something to dwell on. (HT Bruce Daisley)
And finally…
When Apple engineers presented the first prototype for the iPod to Steve Jobs he said to them that it was way too big. The engineers responded by telling him that it would be impossible to get it any smaller. Jobs picked up the prototype, walked over to his fish tank and dropped it in. When it reached the bottom of the tank small bubbles floated to the top. ‘Those are air bubbles,’ he said to the engineers, ‘that means there’s space in there. Make it smaller.’ (HT Sean Xie)
Weeknotes
This was the week that this Substack passed 11,000 subscribers which pleases me greatly, so my thanks to all of you. As well as the keynote at the CIPD conference I ran a workshop on AI with the leadership team of my travel client in Derby and delivered some trends webinars for the folk at Econsultancy. Over the weekend I’ll be travelling out to the Middle East again to work with my banking client out there and then when I come back I’ll be cycling with some other MAMILs in Suffolk.
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My favourite quote captures what I try to do every day, and it’s from renowned Creative Director Paul Arden: ‘Do not covet your ideas. Give away all you know, and more will come back to you’.
And remember - only dead fish go with the flow.