A new article by Stby is featured in the latest issue of Touchpoint, the Journal of Service Design. The theme of this special issue of Touchpoint is ‘The Employee Journey’, and this is a topic we’ve successfully worked on with our client VodafoneZiggo. We were honoured that Dorien Hendriksen, Senior Wellbeing & Employee Experience Manager at VodafoneZiggo, was happy to co-author this article with Geke van Dijk from Stby. Together we looked back at the objectives, process, activities and results of the project we worked on.
The project described in the article was focused on mapping and improving the so-called ‘candidate journey’. It involved our focus on the various steps in the process a candidate goes through for a new job at VodafoneZiggo, from initially responding to a job ad until the first day of employment. We carried out this work from three perspectives: Candidates who are applying for a job, hiring managers who are looking for new team members, and recruiting managers who coordinate the hiring process. All three roles are intensely involved in the candidate’s journey, and the actions of any of them can each make or break the journey.
The HR department who commissioned the project was curious to apply the service design approach of mapping and improving journeys to the employee experience for which they are responsible. Their motto is that for an organisation to be customer-centric it also needs to be employee-centric; in effect: “We cannot have satisfied customers if we don’t have satisfied employees”.
VodafoneZiggo is 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.
VodafoneZiggo’s HR department clearly recognises that satisfied employees are key to successfully providing services that satisfy customers. This article describes a specific employee-focused service design project, combined with a more high-level reflection on how a large organisation such as VodafoneZiggo is gradually integrating service design into their core ways of working. This transition typically happens over the course of many different projects and takes several years. Stby, as well as other service design agencies, have supported the organisation in this transition. Through this work, the strong customer-centric culture of VodafoneZiggo is becoming more and more grounded in an employee-centric culture as well.
Stby and VodafoneZiggo have collaborated on several service design projects over the years. This experience and long-term relationship helped us to jointly look back for this article at the various impacts of the project from a wider perspective. Reflecting on this candidate journey project, and its internal follow-up, we can recognise impact within four areas: ‘Project’, ‘Portfolio’, ‘Mindset’, and ‘Collaboration’.
If you’re interested in reading the article, and the rest of the content of this Touchpoint magazine, you can find more information on the website of the Service Design Network (SDN), who are the publishers of Touchpoint. For members of the network, a PDF version magazine is available free of charge. For non-members, the PDF or a printed version of the magazine can be bought online.
