Employee- vs Human-Centered Workplace
& How People Data Fits Into Both
The new darlings of post-pandemic workplace practices are the concepts of “Employee-centered design” and “Human-centered design”. They both have a lot in common and convey a thoughtful approach to crafting the future work policies. Both focus on putting the employee experience first and creating workplaces policies to support people’s professional and personal needs. Finally, both help to improve productivity and create enjoyable day-to-day experiences.
However, the two frameworks have a fundamental difference, and their application can lead to quite contrasting outcomes for an organization over the long term.
Start with Employee-Centered Design
This popular approach focuses on designing the best possible experience for different profiles within an organization. The process starts with splitting the employee population into categories and describing each one’s specific elements.
Such grouping is typically done based on job type, seniority, level of compensation, tenure, etc. It can also be worth segmenting around age, gender, location, family status, etc. The latter approach is particularly useful in today’s context of work-life balance factors coming to the forefront.
Drill Down with Human-Centered Approach
The major difference of the human-centered approach from an employee-centered one is in the choice of persona. Human-centered design focuses on truly unlocking the employee’s perspective and immersing into how people feel at work. It builds upon the employee-centered concept, but goes deeper than just identifying workplace needs. It’s final goal is to embrace the emotional spectrum, and appeal to employee’s motivations for being their best selves.
Human-Centered Workplace Design is a very powerful concept. Not only does it reflect the nuances of people’s needs during their workday. But it is also a great new tool in our hands which can help us to understand evolving behaviors, references and pain points. Business leaders who are able to make good use out of this understanding during today’s time of deep reformation and apply it to their strategic workforce planning will build up their competitive edge for tomorrow.
How People Analytics Can Drive the Discovery Process
By applying your already existing data streams in a right way, companies can quickly produce a very fine-grained picture of how employees are going through their workday journey. It is essentially getting employees individual digital profiles, which then can be unpacked further.
What data analysts can do now with the employees’ workday journey graphs is to test them within different physical workplace contexts. The effect of each change in workplace policy become visible in real time. Analysts start collecting a consistent picture of productivity and engagement trends, analyze them, and discover the root-cause effects.
Such decisions as ideal co-location time among teams or maximum weekly remote time for a certain role now can rely on objective data. With every day the value of those insights is rising, as it reflects a larger variety of physical workplace factors, such as space type, commute time, on-site amenities, etc.
Today’s decision on embracing a human-centered approach to workplace will almost certainly yield huge benefits in a matter of months. Setting up an automated data feedback loop and running fast experiments enable businesses to understand quickly what works and what doesn’t, then eventually creating truly engaging workplace experience ahead of others leads to building up a strong competitive advantage on the tightening talent market.