Q&A on How to Connect Design Principles to HR

When people think of Human Resources, they do not often consider design thinking principles. However, Monir Azzouzi, Chief People Experience Officer at GoToko, wants HR leaders to connect design thinking with both talent management and business objectives. Aligning these goals requires a creative approach to HR. 

Azzouzi will share these tips and ideas with the audience at HR and Future of Work APAC in March 2023. It's free to join this online event, and you can register now. In the meantime, here's an interview that provides a sneak peek of the session:  

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HREN: What is design thinking? What are design thinking principles and how do they relate to HR? Why should an HR professional be interested? 

MA: Much of what we see today is experience driven. It started off with customer experience and later moved on to people experience. And rightly so. I think ensuring the best human centric experiences is the way forward to attract and retain both customers and talent. 

Design thinking principles, such as being human centered, collaborative, having different personas and iterative solutions, have helped us create the best possible experiences for our people. I rarely go through a full three to five days of a design thinking exercise. We instead take bits and pieces of the methodology but what we make the most use of is ensuring that we co-create the solutions with our people. 

I strongly believe that people experience and engagement go hand in hand. All research points toward engaged people delivering better work and being more productive. People experience is not just about events and having fun. I'm talking about how we design our organisation, the policies & processes, how we grow and onboard our people - it’s about all moments and touch points that matter for our people. 

In short, design thinking helps us come up with solutions and initiatives that our people want instead of what HR thinks it wants.

HREN: How can design thinking help with Human Resources? 

MA: Design thinking can help HR in many ways. The question is more about what kind of challenges you’re facing. I was discussing with a good friend of mine, who was telling me his company was having a hard time finding people. My response was obviously different because of the situation tech startups are in at the moment, in which layoffs have become the norm all over the world. My point is that HR can and should use design thinking, but we’ll have to use it differently. Some problems require the full design thinking process, from A to Z. Other challenges can be solved with bits and pieces from the design thinking methodology.  

If the problem is attrition, I would start identifying the core issues with the employees and come up with solutions together. Such design thinking workshops typically take half a day. After the workshops, the participants work together on either prototyping the solutions and/or presenting the solutions to the relevant stakeholders. In this way, the employees feel ownership of the solution and will be much more committed, compared to if HR came up with solutions themselves from their ivory towers.

We, in HR, must move away from trying to come up with solutions in a silo. Whether we like it or not, we’re often perceived as old school and bureaucratic. Co-creation with our people is the way to go, and you’ll be surprised about the ideas and solutions they come up with. Best of all, the rest of the organization will appreciate and buy into the solutions at a higher level because it comes from themselves, compared to HR telling what to do.

One last thing I want to add is that at GoToko, people experience covers tech experience, workplace experience, and HR. In most organizations I’ve been in, I’ve seen misalignments between HR, facilities, and IT. We’ve put these three areas under one umbrella to ensure our people have tools and systems satisfying their personal and business needs and not what the IT department wants or what some old HR legacy policies and systems dictate.

Traditional HR departments aren’t able to take full ownership of people experience holistically. The physical workplace, digital collaboration tools, the way we’re organized, our culture, and the way we engage with each other all impact the way we feel and experience our workplaces. If any of that doesn’t work in GoToko, there’s only one person to point at - me!

HREN: What kind of advice would you like to share with our audience? 

MA: If you’re undergoing any sort of transformation or on your digital journey, I would say, whatever you do, don’t get stuck with the old ways of doing things. Don’t force feed great digital tools into your old-fashioned ways of working. It’s the best time for you to revamp everything you have. Create processes, policies and ways of working that enable or even drive the business toward its goal. Digital should be all about making things more human-centric and efficient. Otherwise, what’s the point of going digital?

Always make sure you have your people and the business as your highest priority, of course, without breaking the law. Design everything to enable the business strategy and the best people experiences possible. Design thinking is one out of several ways to achieve this.

At GoToko, it worked out great. Within eight months, the foundation for HR, facilities, and IT was in place and fully digitalized. Based on our initiatives we achieved a people experience satisfaction score of 90% which we’re extremely happy about.

Don't miss your chance to learn about design principles at Azzouzi's session or any of the other innovative discussions that will be sparked at HR and Future of Work APAC in March. Register now. It's free.