‘There is a clear set of tools and skills in Human-centered Design that can drive better business results. That is the primary business case for why you should look at hiring more people with these skills.’
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Businesses face a challenging question this time of year: ‘Where should we invest time and resources for the year ahead?’ What if you could re-focus your organization to discover what matters most to customers and your employees so you know more precisely where to invest and disinvest?
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The methodology in Human-centered Design does exactly that.

Every organization wants to know which offerings have an outsized impact on customer and employee commitment and loyalty, the problems people want to solve and how strongly they feel about those interactions. What if you could know what drives buying decisions for customers and the things that increase commitment from both customers and employees? Getting this kind of insight helps you know which solutions to focus on to drive your business in the coming year.

This is what Human-centered Design (HCD) was created for. HCD was born out of the Tech Revolution when computers and technology moved from the small domain of Computer Scientists to becoming a mass-market Consumer Product – a laptop or desktop in every office or home and later mobile devices for everyone. Tech has driven the global economy for decades now and spawned thousands of new products and businesses. Developers of these products had to become User-centric and move fast to develop new solutions to stay competitive.

This methodology is behind User Experience, Customer Experience and now People Experience. Most leaders are not aware that there is a clear set of tools and skills in Human-centered Design that can drive better business results. That is the primary business case for why you should look at hiring more people with these skills and systematically build these capabilities across your organization.
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What are the Top 5 skills you should look for?

1. Transformation Leadership – above all, you want people who have led the kind of business transformation you want to execute. If you are moving to a more Product-focused and User-centric model, you want people who have led that sort of change. Whatever business you are in, you want a Transformation leader who can change your way of working to be more collaborative, faster, and data-driven. Someone who knows how to energize and motivate people to change.
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2. Field Research & Research Design – you need people who know how to set up and implement research of your customers and employees. Experience data is balanced between qualitative and quantitative insights. For example, we can use open text questions to identify what matters with a few people and then validate responses over larger populations. More on that below in ‘Analytics’.
   
   For research to be reliable, you need multiple data points, also known as ‘Triangulation’. This means you vary your methodology or approach (e.g. decision data can’t come via only one survey), vary those who you study and vary those doing the research, to avoid natural biases. You want researchers who know which questions to ask and get to the bottom of what drives behavior and WHY people do what they do. You don’t always need a lot of time or a big study – for example, talking to 5 people can reveal 85% of the problems with a User Interface.
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3. Journey Management – We experience the products we use and the work we do in Journeys so a Journey Map is the optimal and most complete way to capture insights for Customer or Work Experience. You want people who can engage Customers and Employees to describe their Journey, and the problems they’re trying to solve, the pain points in their experience and what are their Moments that Matter (which interactions have outsized impact on commitment and performance).  Service Design is a branch of HCD, designed for the systems that exist in organizations that captures how well your processes, people and systems support the Customer or Colleague Journey.
   
   You want to attach all your data insights to that Journey Map and use that Map as your Information System and primary Project Management tool. Now imagine, you have maps for all your end-to-end Journeys at different levels. How will you manage that information and data? Your people also need to be adept at Journey Management who know which kinds of insights to share with different Stakeholders and which projects to put forward e.g. do you want greatest reach and impact or to build strategic solutions that take longer, etc.? Here is a great article on Journey Management by our partners at Smaply.
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4. Analytics – along with Journey Management, you need Analytics skills supporting both Qualitative & Quantitative insights. Quantitative insights (what most surveys are built on) tell you ‘What’ is happening but not ‘Why’. Qualitative insights e.g. interviews, observation, text comments, etc. can help you understand why people do what they do and what kinds of problems they are trying to solve as well as how they feel about it. The best Analytics people know and when to utilize both Qual and Quant tools. They can work with your Researchers and Journey Management staff to design Research and evaluate the results.
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5. Working in Agile Product Teams – most of our internal and external solutions involve multiple functions e.g. people responsible for Content, Design, Delivery, Communication, Compliance, etc. but organizations often struggle to break out of working in silo’s. You need people who can form and lead cross-functional teams, know how to lead Design Sprints quickly integrating insights from your research and impactful moments, and creating and testing Prototypes with End Users and Stakeholders. Engage your Leadership in coming up with more flexible reporting relationships that support this way of working.
   
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Ideally, your leads in User, Customer and People Experience should have expertise in these 5 skills. Our research shows that most UX people are better trained and experienced in these areas. CX people also show good levels of expertise but lag UX. But fewer than 10% of People Experience leaders have certification or on-the-job experience in Human-centered Design, Analytics, Agile or some form of Research.

Often, People Experience leads come from another HR role and aren’t even aware of what they should learn or know. If you want results from your People Experience function, hire people who already have that experience coming from User or Customer Experience (from within your organization or hiring from outside if necessary), who demonstrate skills in the above 5 areas, rather than someone who has never done this work before. When you’re interviewing a past head of People Experience, make sure they have expertise in these 5 areas.

Many organizations have jump-started their capability building in these areas by moving people from across their organization. We profiled Walmart in a previous article, who rotated 100 people from UX, E-commerce, Analytics, Agile and similar roles into their People Experience team. IBM started their People Experience team by moving UX and Digital people who had done a project for HR on the company’s Development Experiences.

Another success factor is where you put your Experience people. The most successful companies put their UX, CX and PX people in a place where they are not limited to supporting only one function e.g. Marketing (for CX) or Human Resources (for PX). This reinforces the Silo Behavior noted above. We’ve seen these roles work quite well together in a central function such as CIO or COO with dotted lines to Marketing, Product and HR.

Why is that so important? From the User perspective, colleagues experience a Workplace and don’t interact with HR all that often (and they don’t join or leave because of HR). Our experience of work extends to EVERY aspect of the Workplace. So the People Experience role needs to connect with those aspects.

Consequently, we have not seen success where organizations have placed People Experience under a function or CoE within Human Resources e.g. under Talent, Analytics, Engagement or Learning. The most successful People Experience Heads, if not in a central function, are in a role reporting directly into the Chief People Officer. This gives them more visibility for their data both within and outside the function (if the CPO supports that) and more importantly, to coordinate Journey Management with all the other functions within HR as well as critical functions e.g. Facilities, IT/Digital, Marketing and Communications.
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In Summary:

1. Build the 5 key capabilities in your organization and get all your functions working more like a Product Team, with research that focuses on Pain Points and Moments that Matter
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2. Hire people to lead your People Experience team who have demonstrated skills and expertise from UX or CX-related roles, since Human-centered Design works the same across domains. Avoid hiring HR people with no experience.
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3. Place your UX-CX-PX roles in a central place where they can service the needs of both customers and colleagues. Avoid placing People Experience under a sub-function of HR where their impact will be limited. Set up your organization structure where you can fully leverage the impact on your customers and business.
   
   

About the Author: Elliott Nelson is a coach to executives and teams on building a stronger Human Experience of Work. He founded the Global HX Leaders Network & leads a Retained Search business for Experience professionals. He is a former head of Talent & Transformation at Pfizer, AkzoNobel, Novartis, Siemens & Fujitsu.