FAQ: Driving employee retention with human-centered design

November 30, 2023

Keeping employees on your payroll takes more than just paying a competitive salary. It also requires an environment that allows them to do their best work and feel like they are valued as humans.

Ignoring the employee experience can be costly. According to a Gallup survey, the cost of replacing an individual employee can range from one-half to two times the employee’s annual salary. Given the current rate of voluntary employee turnover, Gallup estimates that U.S. employers spend about $1 trillion per year just to replace talent. While some churn is natural, 52% of voluntarily exiting employees say their organization could have done something to prevent them from leaving their jobs.

By taking a human-centered design approach, businesses can implement employee experience solutions that improve employee retention by reducing frustration, increasing job satisfaction and fostering a deeper sense of purpose. Here’s what you need to know.

: Human-centered design is a strategic approach that prioritizes the needs and behaviors of users when developing products, processes and services. This approach leverages behavioral science, user research and analytics to provide new insight into how to make user experiences more intuitive and impactful.

: By aligning the business with how employees actually work, you can eliminate the real-world pain points and daily friction that affect employee satisfaction most.

Key to this approach is creating a detailed understanding of the employee experience. By exploring the actual day-to-day life of employees—their role, their tasks, the tools they use and how they work with others throughout the organization—you can discover new possibilities to improve their work environment and processes.

: Compared to a traditional approach, where employee experience solutions are mandated from the top down, a human-centered design approach helps uncover the subtle nuances in the employee experience that may go unnoticed but have a significant impact on morale. You can then create tailored solutions that meet the specific needs of employees, streamline clunky processes, eliminate any areas of confusion or ambiguity and ensure the employee experience keeps pace with the changes of a dynamic market and employment landscape.

In addition, a human-centered approach may involve stakeholders from multiple departments instead of just HR, involved in employee experience consulting, which creates a wider, deeper and more holistic understanding of the employee journey.

: There are many ways a human-centered design approach can improve the employee experience and increase retention, such as:

Discovery

Deep-dive interviews, surveys and observation sessions can help employers understand the needs, pain points and aspirations of employees by gathering genuine feedback and insights directly from the source.

Definition

Using these insights, employers can create a detailed employee journey map that represents different stages of an employee’s experience, ranging from onboarding to potential exit.

Development

By identifying specific areas of friction in the employee journey map, cross-functional teams can then brainstorm and ideate employee experience solutions. Pilot programs with small employee groups are used to test solutions and gather feedback to ensure the solution meets the needs of the employee user, not just the business.

Delivery

The solution is then launched and continuously refined by leveraging employee feedback, ensuring it continues to meet employee needs as their pain points and friction areas evolve.

: You can directly measure your employee retention rate before and after implementing a new employee experience solution to determine if a new initiative created using a human-centered design approach was effective. While this number is key to measuring the success of the initiative, keep in mind that it is a lagging indicator and may not tell the whole story. Here are a few other ways to gauge success:

Employee surveys

Qualitative surveys can help you understand how employees perceive the new initiative to help you discover if you’re on the right path or if you need to make further adjustments. These surveys can also help you quickly discover specific issues that arise from the initiative. By consistently measuring employee sentiment as a leading indicator, you can get a real-time pulse of employee engagement.

Time adapting to change

One of the best ways to measure human-centered design success is change management, training and adoption times. You’ll know that your design is affecting the right drivers when the time it takes for your employees to adjust to new ideas and processes decreases.

Exit interviews

Keeping in mind that the goal is to reduce voluntary employee turnover, not eliminate it, exit interviews can provide key insights into the success of your initiative. If fewer employees cite the issue that your initiative aimed to solve—in other words, if they’re quitting for different reasons—it tells you that the initiative was a success. If it continues to be mentioned, these interviews may provide insight to help you iterate and optimize the initiative so that it becomes more effective.

Operational metrics

Employees who feel more productive are more likely to stick around longer. Improvement in KPIs like productivity and efficiency can indicate that employees are more engaged.

Referral rates

In addition to wanting to work for their employer longer, engaged employees are more likely to recommend an open position to a friend. If you see an improvement in referral rates, it’s a strong indicator of improved long-term confidence in the company among current employees.

: When you leverage human-centered design to improve the employee experience, you help employees feel more engaged and connected to business objectives. While this goes a long way towards driving gains in employee retention, it also helps ensure that your employees have a positive attitude, have the tools they need to do their jobs effectively and feel motivated to deliver their best.

As a result, customers get to experience better service, faster and more accurate responses and more memorable interactions with your staff. This translates to happier customers for more repeat purchases, greater customer lifetime value and favorable word-of-mouth, all of which help drive bottom line growth.

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FAQ: Driving employee retention with human-centered design

Discovery

Definition

Development

Delivery

Employee surveys

Time adapting to change

Exit interviews

Operational metrics

Referral rates

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