In the spring of 2022, companies everywhere faced similar talent challenges: a tight labor market, a workforce that had been stretched thin for months, exhaustion from COVID disruptions, and new employees hired during WFH who still did not feel connected to their teams or the company as a whole. Global marketing and communications leader Publicis recognized the importance of equipping their talent leaders to develop innovative strategies to address these challenges.
Through a series of discovery interviews, Ei identified Empathy Research as a core focus area and crafted and delivered a two-part series that taught talent leaders the process and tools of design thinking. Talent leaders from around the world participated in a design sprint focused on three employee-experience challenges: attracting talent in a tight labor market; retaining talent with superior employee experiences; and upskilling for new roles and responsibilities. We taught teams to do empathy interviews and helped them identify insights and use those to propose solutions that they pitched to executive leadership.
Teams developed more than 20 solutions and, through a peer feedback process, selected 6 of the top ideas to pitch to executive leaders. The pitches opened up conversation between strategic leaders and talent managers around broader company goals and challenges, and helped identify key strategic needs that talent managers could help address. Talent managers emerged with a concrete set of tools to help them identify specific challenges for their region and market, and to address those through a design process that centered employee experience at each step.
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