Karen Rozenbaum

ECD is an employee centric design programme that empowers employees to become agents of change, by engaging them in your organisation's challenges from the start. Through a four-step process, which involves employees in the co-designing of the organisational change upfront, we identify, inspire, and integrate them, to embrace change and thrive.

Whether you want a digital service that offers personalised content about how the world of work is changing, to inspire your employees to take action inside your organisation, or customised workshops to help them envision and co-design what the change could look like upfront, ECD empowers you to create a culture of change agents.

With the accelerated pace in how digital technologies advance and influence customer’s behaviours and processes, organisations are trying to keep up to date by going through changes all the time. After interviewing employees that are going through changes, I discovered whenever a new system is in place it causes fear; either because they don’t understand the importance of it or because they are afraid they don’t have the necessary skills and might lose their jobs. Moreover, large-legacy type organisations are the ones having the most difficulties adapting to these new ways of working, suffering from high turnover costs, shortage of skills, and losing talents to organisations that are already operating and thinking in new ways.

By talking to consultancies, leaders and coaches, the immediate influencers for organisations going through organisational change processes, I found out that this usually happens because change management today is still done with a 20th century mindset, with a top-down approach, forcing employees to ‘accept’ the change someone at the top level decided for them. 

But the nature of work today has changed. In the 21st century employees want to understand the ‘why’. They value a sense of purpose over stability. Collaboration, accountability and opportunities for self-development are their main motivational drivers. Instead of a one-size fits all approach, we’ve got to meet them where they are. Instead of pushing change on them, we can invite them to be part of it. Employees expectations have changed. So, a new, more transparent approach to change management is needed to retain talents and keep employees motivated. Service design can help with that.