Solving complex problems requires collaboration across multiple disciplines. Learning-oriented organisations actively work towards breaking down silos to enable a culture of collaboration and create exceptional experiences for their customers and employees. However, achieving meaningful collaboration is hard work. The journey towards it is akin to therapy for the organisation. It requires deep reflection, courage to accept challenges, commitment to work on them, and – most of all – embracing vulnerability.

Healthcare workers worldwide have been stretched thin and pushed beyond their limits in the years since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. In one comparison of 27 industries, healthcare ranked last for employee satisfaction, and hospitals were ranked among the lowest in satisfaction by consumers. But employee burnout, dissatisfaction and turnover were simmering issues long before Covid-19 brought them to a boiling point. If healthcare workers don’t feel cared for or valued themselves, how can they be expected to provide empathetic, personalised care for their patients?

In this article, we open the door to exploring the interplay of human and social capital strategies for improved employee experience and organisational performance. This approach combines the focus on the employee as an individual, and the focus on employees as an interacting group of individuals.

How can a company deliver an effective on-boarding experience at scale, with high numbers of new hires, across different geographies? In this article we discuss how adopting an inclusive approach, embracing complexity and applying incremental innovation have been key to success in rethinking the employee on-boarding experience at Doctolib, a multi-national health-tech organisation based in France.

VodafoneZiggo, a telecommunications organisation based in the Netherlands, has applied service design for many years in order to review and improve service delivery to its customers. In particular, customer journeys and personas have been embraced as useful methods. While these projects initially focused on customer experience, the service design approach is now also being applied to employee experience projects.

This article will uncover a project where an employee journey served as a starting point for a wider corporate transformation. What made this project unique was that we involved blue-collar workers, who are perhaps not the most common participants in co-design workshops. Our project is illustrated through our sharing of the company context as well as the relevant project phases, and we conclude with insights and learnings.

In recent years, service design has become increasingly important in driving organisational change. One contributing reason is the growing recognition that employee experience significantly impacts both customer satisfaction and the organisation’s bottom line. Service designers are at the forefront of this change, responsible for designing service offerings and implementing and embedding change within organisations. However, this evolution towards becoming catalysts for change comes with challenges, particularly for service designers tasked with changing organisational culture while trying to fit into it.

Employee engagement is a proven foundational component in driving better organisational outcomes. Research shows that companies with highly engaged employees outperform their competitors by 147 percent1. If an organisation seeks to enhance the design and delivery of their products and services, and increase ROI, it needs to first concentrate on creating the best possible employee experience. However, employee engagement has even more benefits. Improved engagement leads to less absenteeism, lower employee turnover and increased productivity.

Though service design has been frequently utilised to enhance employee experiences, it is rarely applied for talent development in an Asian healthcare context. The article discusses service design’s use in the redesign of the Management Associate Programme in Singapore’s Tan Tock Seng hospital and distils three key insights from this exercise.

Companies often celebrate their anniversaries with parties, heartfelt messages from leaders, corporate gifts, or awards to commemorate the occasion and show appreciation for their employees’ contributions. But what better way to mark the occasion than by striving to improve the internal experience of employees? This article tells the story of when that took place within a university in Colombia.

As Service Designers Consultants, we spend most of our time thinking and crafting experiences for our clients, we often use our skillset to engage with users, understand new global trends and deliver value to all kind of industries. This time we had our heads down thinking about our own experience as employees and seeing ourselves as end users. We thought we had overcome the steep learning curve, the one we usually have in a rush when starting a project in a new industry. Little did we know that digging into our own employee experience would take us to another level of exploration

Because services typically have multiple products and subservices, designing a service and measuring its health is complex. We share our approach to (re)designing a NASA service to improve customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX), and service health, whilst incorporating equity into all three.

At Taxfix, we specialise in providing consumer-facing tax services at scale, for the German market. Achieving this requires close collaboration between tax advisors and service designers. Tax advisors are traditionally trained to be precise, avoid mistakes and vigilantly guard against errors. This contrasts sharply with service designers, who are inclined to take risks, embrace uncertainty, and value creative experimentation. In this article, we share insights on our recipe for how to find a productive mode of collaboration between two disiplines which on the face of it seem to be worlds apart.

French industry in general, and the country’s energy sector in particular, is facing a massive shortage of qualified talent. The employee experience is becoming a key issue in the ability of companies within the sector to both operate their services, and gain (and retain) their customers.

For years, AI seemed to me like a storm cloud approaching on the horizon. It was as a distant rumble that was growing louder, but the signs of its arrival were hard to spot. A mobile phone I purchased in 2021 promised built-in AI, and my bank assured me that it was spotting fraud thanks to similar wizardry. But despite knowing it was the ‘next big thing’, I couldn’t easily point to its tangible presence in my daily life.

We are at a tipping point in a tech revolution that has the potential to transform the way we do everything. Generative AI will help us co-create new products, services and experiences. There are at least three roles service designers can play in the development of these new systems. Firstly, it will be about shaping the ways people will understand and interact with the AI. Next, service designers can bring their ‘lens’ to help ensure that those systems are useful, usable, efficient, effective and desirable and differentiated1 (u2e2d2p2) – from both the person and the provider’s point of view. Finally, our best service design methods and foresight can be applied to design responsibly and avoid bias and unintended consequences.