THE WHAT

We applied a design-thinking approach to evolve team operations within a newly formed global employee support team

KEY SKILLS

• Discovery facilitation
• Cross-team collaboration
• Building team identity
• Capacity planning

STATS

Timeline: 1.5 years

Industry: Pharma, Global employee services

My Role: Project Lead

Team: Program Manager partner, Researcher, Service Designer

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HIGHLIGHTS

Improved perceptions and clearer understanding of value, roles and collaboration opportunities across partnering teams

A clear and defined team identity

Capacity planning structure and tools

Partnership framework — owning, partnering vs consulting, to better manage workload and influence

Intake prioritization process

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THE PROBLEM SPACE

A newly formed team wasn’t living up to it’s potential — previous silos were hard to shake and introducing a new way of problem solving through user research was unsuccessful

The team in question was within a pharmaceutical company, specifically a part of the employee services team. This team was newly formed after a restructuring to combine HR, finance, and procurement. If employees needed support with something such as hiring a team in a different country or understanding the steps to taking parental leave or even finding their employee contract details, they would use resources from this employee services team.

The team specifically owned the service experience of this new team, but becoming a unified team wasn’t playing out as hoped. The team was struggling to get buy in for service design as well as get the previously separate teams to see themselves as one employee services team (for example, HR still saw themselves as a separate HR team). As a result, they were overly-eager to take on project opportunities and were over-allocated and struggling to deliver.

OUR GOALS

Short term, our goal was to identify team blockers and build better relationships with partnering teams

Long term, we aimed to shift to a service-design mindset across the employee services team, establishing our service experience team as a go-to partner in designing for a better customer (employee) experience.

OUR APPROACH

We took a design-thinking approach to this problem, starting with digging in with our partner teams