Business Challenge
This Fortune 500 Global Apparel and Footwear client wanted to redesign and improve its employee onboarding experience. Their non-standard process caused lengthy new hire start times and multiple exception paths with various onboarding systems. The experience negatively impacted associate satisfaction and hindered the company’s ability to scale its workforce. The client sought a strategic and comprehensive solution that would:
- Increase Employee Satisfaction – Give new employees and hiring managers a streamlined, expedited onboarding experience that would enable Day one productivity
- Increase Agility – Create a flexible onboarding model that considered people, processes, and technology to increase efficiency while still handling critical exception paths with service level agreements
- Focus on MVP – Design a prototype that would test the efficacy of new onboarding ideas and provide insights and direction for the right onboarding experience to implement
Solution
Experis provided a specialized talent solution to enable the client’s Employee Onboarding Improvements initiative. To do so, we led a team of design thinking experts who collaborated with client stakeholders.
- Service Delivery: We provided an in-house design thinking lead, and service delivery manager to lead research and design activities for the team
- Research Activities: We interviewed stakeholders, employees, and system owners to understand the current state challenges in the user journey, identify and create user personas, and grasp their experience with the company’s onboarding processes.
- Design Activities: We facilitated a 2-day virtual workshop with diverse client stakeholders to unpack the research, create shared empathy around the user experience, and ideate the ideal onboarding story. Ideas generated from the workshop were then translated into a clickable prototype, tested to validate/invalidate direction, and packaged into an easily consumable one-minute pitch video demonstrating the process solution
Experis provided the talent direction to execute the work, which included:
- Milestone-based Delivery: We structured outcomes based on achievable research and design milestones agreed upon by both the client sponsor and Experis team before the initiative began
- Routine Connect-points with Client Sponsor: The Experis design thinking lead met weekly with client leadership achieving the following:
- Communicated team progress
- Managed scope change and risk
- Aligned with client groups not directly affiliated with the project to gain insights and support
- Ensured proper timekeeping and financials
- Provided subject matter expertise to ensure the highest priorities of the employee onboarding initiative stayed at the forefront of delivery
Results
The Experis product development team’s value was measured around multiple services through effective planning and execution. Experis and the client achieved the following:
- Shared Understanding: We conducted user interviews and industry research, developed user personas, and then unpacked this info as part of an interactive 2-day virtual workshop hosted and facilitated by our team
- “Out-of-the-box” Solutions: We guided the client’s internal teams to reframe conversations away from as-is processes and systems toward human-centered ideas
- Validated Approach: We designed a prototype and tested results with users
- Defined Path to Success: We developed a project roadmap and schedule to build out the MVP experience
By partnering with Experis’ team of design thinking experts, this global apparel and footwear client envisioned and validated a strategic and comprehensive digital design solution to improve their employee onboarding experience.
