Summary
Organizations of all sizes often struggle to reap the full benefits of change, especially in times of transformation, despite huge investments in technology and process. This is often because employees don't understand how their role is changing. It may seem simple to just clarify roles and responsibilities, but as with consumer facing products, people are unique, complex, and motivated by factors that aren't always easy to discover. Additionally, designing for the employee can also mean designing for stakeholder buy-in. This is a story about a real world approach to building practical application of empathy across multiple disciplines and reporting lines, overcoming reservations, navigating politics, with the goal of building a lasting partnership where employee UX design/execution is a team sport and never outsourced.
Key Insights
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Failing to understand internal cultures and employee perspectives undermines adoption of new technology, even if it benefits customers.
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Empathy must extend beyond individual users to larger communities and cross-functional teams to drive successful organizational change.
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Connecting empathy directly to strategic value helps secure executive sponsorship and team alignment.
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Rigid adherence to roadmaps and siloed mindsets prevent teams from seeing broader impacts and collaborating effectively.
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Embedding empathy in enterprise projects requires understanding the pressures and constraints other teams face.
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Advocacy or action networks serve as effective environments for discovery and two-way communication across teams.
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Translating empathy insights into accessible formats tailored to different team contexts increases engagement and understanding.
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Providing upfront value without requiring heavy process learning lowers barriers to adoption and excitement.
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Scaling empathy inside organizations helps shift employee mindset from compliance to ownership and collaboration.
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Focusing on employees as humans with pressures and needs—as well as customers—improves technology and process implementation success.
Notable Quotes
"I didn’t understand the people who internally would be using it, and that came back to haunt me almost immediately."
"There’s this really big common goal at the company level, but all these subcultures live inside that, each with their own drivers."
"Nobody wanted to touch the thing because it was seen as some way of pointing the finger—you did a bad job."
"We had to figure out how do we export our empathy to all those other teams that were also making things in that same space."
"Everyone was just staying in their lane and so focused on delivery that they didn’t understand how their project impacted others."
"Advocacy networks gave us a conduit to share information and let team members be ambassadors to their peers."
"We made it cheap and easy—no fee for entry—so teams could get value first before learning complex processes."
"It almost inspired competitiveness in executives wanting to connect with the end users—the employees."
"There’s so much pressure in large organizations; empathy for others around you is key, not just the end user."
"I’d challenge you to connect empathy to strategic value and think beyond your immediate project into the larger ecosystem."
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