How Sky UK's HR Department has Embraced Design Thinking

We embraced design thinking, which is about problem finding and you always start design thinking with a really great question.

And if there’s one nickable you take today it would be any question that starts with ‘how might we…’ almost certainly will get a different conversation than if you started it with ‘what can we…’ ‘How’ is action focused, rather than ‘what’, which is a thing or a noun. ‘Might’ is an openness to possibility – we don’t know the answer – whereas ‘can’ is a capability question. And ‘we’ is about collaboration. ‘How might we?’ opens up the conversation.

So we went after the question, ‘how might we help people at Sky have a fulfilling career?’ It’s a big, bold question, but we went after it. And what my team did is then embrace the design thinking model – what is, what if, what wows, what works? I’ll take you through. This started in February, so it’s hot off the press.

So what they did with ‘what is’ – ‘what is’ is where you actually go and talk to people about what, in this case, career means to them. What they think the obstacles are, what has helped them in their career, where they feel it’s been easy and where it’s been difficult. My team, in eight workdays, spoke to 25 employees. New starters, people who were leaving or had left Sky, people who had been there for five years, 10 years, 20 years. They spoke to them face to face, in person, for 90 minutes.

The thing that we were stunned by is that, I don’t know about you but Sky have a back-to-back meeting culture – to get time into people’s diaries you need about six weeks notice. People fell over themselves to give 90 minutes of their diary to talk about this. What does that tell you about this topic? It’s really, really important to people. We found out their pain points, we found out their motivations, we understood that career actually means about eight different things to people. And if we didn’t ask those questions, again we probably would’ve solved the wrong problem.

The second thing that we then did was go after ‘what if?’ This is where actually and importantly you get employees, our people, involved in the brainstorming. They actually come in and help us with the creative thinking. This whole way through the design thinking the principle is co-creation. HR doesn’t have to have the answers. We don’t have to know what the right thing is. The best way that we’re going to solve it is by asking our people to help us solve it for them, because this is about solving something for the employee for the person, not for HR. That’s a really key difference.

The third thing: ‘what wows?’ What the team then does is take all of this data and all of this insight and comes up with four ideas that it thinks people will actually respond well to, it thinks that people will go ‘wow.’ And it might do it up as a drawing, I think they did one of them up as Lego, it doesn’t matter, it’s to try and represent the idea. And then again they go back and they go, ‘I want to present this idea to you,’ and they’re not actually really that interested in what the person says. What do you think they’re looking at? Their reaction.

So if I show you an idea, what will your face do immediately? It’ll either light up and go, ‘wow, that’s a great idea,’ or they’ll do this [feigns look of ambivalence]. And if they do that, then we probably haven’t quite nailed the idea. But in this instance what we’re doing is we’re presenting an idea. It’s really risky – people don’t actually like presenting ideas for critique, so it is quite a bold and brave move – but what they’re looking for is what they look like, what their body language is, because remember what employee experience is about is delighting people, creating a real wow experience. And again design thinking allows you again to go through that process.