THE CHALLENGE

Those moments when associates receive performance feedback and are informed of compensation decisions significantly influence how associates feel about an organization – and their relationship with their leader. This organization was not immune to such challenges and requested our help.

 

THE SOLUTION

Collaborating with the HR team, we began the project by interviewing associates and gaining an understanding of their experiences. We mapped these experiences to visualize and reveal pain points and to identify potential opportunities from two perspectives - individual contributors and people leaders. Among many insights, we learned the experience felt overly transactional to individual contributors. From the people leaders, we learned that they didn’t feel they had the appropriate level of autonomy and as a result disconnected themselves from the responsibility of decisions. There was too much focus on the policies and process, not enough on personalization, the context, and the value of authentic dialogue. 

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With the goal of creating a meaningful experience for all stakeholders, we designed a roadmap of design sprints with a manageable short-term track and a long-term track. As the feedback/compensation cycle would begin in a month’s time we initially focused on the short-term track – namely, demystifying and simplifying communication and enriching dialogue. ​​

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THE VALUE

Putting ourselves in the shoes of individual contributors and people leaders with the objective of making communications more usable and dialogue more meaningful, we launched two interactive digital guides through cycles of idea generation, prototyping, and testing - one for individual contributors and another for people leaders. The guide accompanied by dialogue planners that provided prompts prepared stakeholders on what to expect and how they could enhance the experience for themselves and each other. NPS scores for the annual process improved by 10%. And the testimonials were gold!