A Design Thinking For HR Professionals Workshop for 2 days was organized with Mr. Gaurav Nigam as the guest speaker.
The workshop started with a remarkable introduction. The speaker ensured that the session is interactive from the very beginning. He began by defining what a design looks like when one implements a plan and sets a goal. The four phases to improve the employee experience were explained intricately, which enabled the students to understand how to be creative while implementing design thinking. Further, he took up an Infosys case study regarding how they brought up some ideas to deal with the pandemic, how they came up with alternatives for assessing the employees for any presence of the virus before entering the building. Also, on how the firm was keen on maintaining a clean and hygienic workplace. To make the session even more interactive and enjoyable, he proposed a game wherein we had to guess the names of the movie based on the clues displayed in the presentation.
We were divided into groups of 4 and given a task, and each group was asked to identify problems taking up both an HR, as well as an employee’s perspective. Following this, we were asked to list our points down on an empathy map. All of this was to be presented by the groups on day 2 of the workshop. Day 1 of the workshop ended with us being assigned a group presentation of developing an idea to tackle a problem framing an empathy map and make a journey map.
Day 2 of the workshop began with recalling the learnings of the previous day. Then the speaker went ahead speaking about the employee life cycle, how important it was for every organization. He talked about how to get employees to work and decrease the attrition rate at any point in time. The maturity solar system was explained in a very detailed manner, with examples of different levels; level 1 to 5:
Producers ->Connectors -> Architects -> Scientists ->Visionaries
The workshop got more engaging when he introduced another game: Guess the personality? Here, seven students who were pre-selected randomly had given three truths and one lie of their life, and to make it trickier, the identities were kept anonymous, and the rest of the class had to guess the student. This game helped test the observation skills of the students, also how well they knew their classmates. Later, the concept of design thinking was concluded with the explanation of an employee’s lifecycle, post which the student’s presentation session began. Students voiced their thoughts on the problems faced by employees and HR professionals, and how they worked on finding solutions for the same through empathy and journey maps. The students received constructive feedback for their inputs. The two-day workshop was an insightful one.