Is Employee Experience the next-level extension for Design Systems?
The current ‘ideal state’ of our Design Systems
We as product designers spend an enormous amount of time crafting our design system. We carefully plan every aspect and scenario when the product we design meets the users. A well-designed design system contains detailed information about our brand, foundations, the content we create, the voice and tone we speak, and all of our components and patterns. It also contains our manifesto, who we are, and what we believe in.
We need to put a huge effort to do this because, in the digital world, the success of the product we create relies heavily on its design, its user interface, and the experience of the user. All of this is about user-facing. But there is another important aspect that will define if the product will be an overall success or a huge failure. It is our experience as employees who work on the product and try to create the best outcome possible. The great resignation just made it crucial -as an employer companies should do the same and have the same consistency when they interact with their employees.
Employee experience is a key aspect of building a successful product
However employee experience is also a key aspect that is at least as important as the experience of the user, we hardly ever do anything about it as designers.
Have you ever worked at a company where the design system was perfectly shaped, but the inner communication went through loose and often lost random google doc links and hallway conversations without any sign of a designed structure or plan? If you do, you understand the context.
Another example would be the employee’s first day at work. I worked for several companies and I can still recall what was my overall experience on the first day at work. The power of these “liminal” experiences-moments of transition is so important, that religions put an incredible emphasis on these moments (Bar and bat mitzvahs in Judaism, Confirmation in Catholicism, etc.) There is a lot of power in the ritual of these moments. If it is carefully planned and designed well, it can define your upcoming career path at the company.
I made a random Google search and was not able to find any articles about how a company’s design system, the design language that designers speak aligns/relates with the employee experience. There is a ton about employee experience as a standalone thing, but not in the context of designers/design systems. So it seems that it is quite hard to find a company where the designers work on their own experience. I only know a few examples, like Airbnb's wall of stories and Canva’s Candidate experience.
Is Employee Wellbeing an HR question only?
If I would ask 10 product people, probably 8 out of 10 would say that it is an HR problem. So why would they bother? But is it just an HR problem that we can not influence? We fought really hard, back in the days to ‘get a seat at the table’, and now we have it, we design expensive software and we are part of important product decisions. Is there a better way to make use of our knowledge than designing our experience at the workplace we work at? How else could we use our skills better than influencing our own well-being and through that our productivity? How we overall feel at the company has a tremendous effect on our work. One of the main functions of Design Systems is to create a unified language within and between cross-functional teams and departments. How come an employee experience framework is not already an extension of the Design Systems?
The maturity levels of a Design System
In this great article, Alec Nicholls includes a great image of design system maturity. Based on this image, the final- most desired- goal/ outcome is a design system that is public and used by the whole company (Phase Five: The public). In this stage customer-facing is polished and (almost) perfectly established but how about the employee side? I truly think there is a level beyond that, an extra layer, that is the missing extension of design systems- designing the employee experience. So I need to update the image with this and mark this extra layer. (see image above)
I think we should be able to come up with an established employee experience framework and make it somehow part of our Design Systems as an extension. Also share it with all our colleagues and the executives at our company.
What would be the benefits of including employee experience in our design language?
- As an internal extension, it would “open up” our Design Systems to others within the company than just designers, copywriters, and developers
- Employees would know what to expect from day 1 or even before that (Pre-Employment)- which creates consistency
- A well-designed employee lifecycle results in a better employee retention rate
- Easier to hire in-house roles- treating employees right spreads fast by word of mouth
- Well documented processes
- Cross-Department collaboration where everyone contributes to making the best employee experience, not just HR
Designing the Employee Experience framework
This framework could contain the whole employee lifecycle. It starts with recruiting and ends with the employee leaving the company. How your company handles job participants, its onboarding structure, how the company communicates internally, flawless executive communication channels, we can set up a well-designed framework for all that and not just that. Where do you collect the inner/domain knowledge? Does the organization have an LMS (Learning Management System) that is easy to use? All this information can be included.
Start with small steps
A couple of ideas on how to start: before we start to create this, how about researching our own colleagues? To see what is important to them. As every company is different the employee experience foundation should reflect on who its employees are. It is hard to think about research that would be easier to conclude and more fun than the one you do with your own colleagues.
Getting together with HR and helping them with our research techniques to understand employee pain points, needs, hierarchies, processes, and their personal and department-level goals could be a great second step. Creating a basic framework to make it easier for them to do it on their own could be a great first outcome.
I wrote this article as a conversation starter as I think we really have a blind spot when we talk about our relationships with the place we work at. If the only thing you do is reach out to HR and offer your help to make the employee experience better, you already started something great. If you have any feedback or great ideas, please feel free to share them in the comments.
