Over the past decades, multiple HR constructs have emerged that organizations strived to adopt and integrate into their daily businesses. The most recent development is Employee Experience (EX). EX is essentially a framework for creating engaged employees. Engaged employees have been linked to multiple desirable business outcomes, such as smoother employee recruitment, increased employee retention, increased employee efficiency and higher organizational profitability. EX can be defined as the sum of perceptions employees have about their interactions with the organization, and how this aligns with their expectations. This graduation project aims to explore how organizations can improve EX. It was carried out for Livework, a Rotterdam based Service Design studio. The project explores how organizations are currently working on EX, what creates excellent EX and how organizations can receive the tools to understand and improve EX. A literature review is conducted on the evolution of HR constructs. Relevant insights from established constructs, such as motivation and job satisfaction are collected and related to EX. To understand how organizations understand and currently address EX, a set of interviews is conducted. This set of interviews yields a three-step model that describes what needs to be done to improve EX. The three steps are:
1. Learning about the value of EX
2. Learning how to improve EX
3. Measuring impact.
To structure the large amount of information available on EX, a model is selected. First, six different models are compared to assess their suitability for structuring EX. Finally, one model is selected and further adapted to create the EX pyramid. The pyramid depicts five employee needs that organizations need to satisfy to create excellent EX: Safety/Security, Rewards, Connection, Growth and Work/Life harmony. The EX pyramid and the EX cycle provide all the information an organization needs to improve EX. Ideas are generated to design the way this information is communicated to Livework, who this project was carried out for, and their client organizations. The problem statement used to guide the phase of idea generation and prototyping is: How can organizations adopt fitting EX strategies? The final design is the EXcellent process: a process towards excellent EX. This process consists of three phases: prepare, understand, and imagine. During the prepare phase, Livework consults the EX pyramid to create a better understanding of the model, which is used throughout the process. During the understand phase, Livework and the client conduct qualitative and quantitative research to understand how well the organization is satisfying their employees’ needs. In addition, the business objectives of the organization provide direction for the pyramid levels that needs to be improved. During the imagine phase, Livework and the organization define interventions that will be used to improve specific levels of the pyramid. A digital slide deck of over seventy interventions provides inspiration for these improvements. The outcomes of the EXcellent process are a better understanding of employee needs, business objective and how they together deliver concrete steps an organization can take to improve EX.

Organisations find it more and more difficult to deal with our changing times, as our world has drastically changed over the last decades. This has led us to believe that organisational theory and practice from the last decades just does not hold up anymore. They have created organisations that made sense then, but do not necessarily now. Organisations themselves need to change in order to keep up with this sped up world. To achieve better success, many organisations are (constantly) entrenched in large-scale change efforts. However, these do not guarantee improvement, with various studies suggesting only about 25 to 50% of these efforts succeed, and numbers are declining. Given the shortcomings to current organisation design theory and change management practices, a new approach could better link theory and practice to increase practical validity.
Therefore, strategic design is used as a new approach to describe organisations, their design and change processes. The research question following this idea is:
How can strategic design be of value in the understanding of and quest for progressive organisations, their design and the design and realisation of accompanying change efforts, to survive and thrive in the context of 21st century challenges? The research focuses on progressive organisations: those that are as ready for the present and future as possible and that (aim to) achieve three distinct abilities: engagement amongst employees, organisational agility and organisational ambidexterity. The focus on design leads to a new view on organisations as a set of organisational blocks and their connections. The approach, based on literature on progressive organisations, insights into design and prototyping and learnings from practice, is specifically human-centred. Organisations are defined from the viewpoint of the employee. The goal of this approach is to understand the organisation in a different way and make it possible to build a new organisation together with the employees in an iterative manner. The various organisational blocks are: raison d’être, environments, culture, grounding and action agenda. In order to achieve a progressive organisation, built on the aforementioned blocks, lessons from design and practice are combined to argue that the only way to deal with complexity is through iteration and repeated learnings. Based on this understanding, (semi-) controlled revolutions become the new approach to change efforts. The end-goal should not be to design or deduce static organisational plans, but to (constantly) adapt to the changing conditions, with the realisation that not all things can be predicted or controlled. This iteration is depicted in the figure to the left. Given this understanding, a revolution is guided by three principles: going from planned to hacked, not forcing, but inviting people to join the effort and to stop managing the effort, but going viral.
In order to increase the probability of successful change, and to increase the usefulness of this research, a revolution checklist is presented. Together, they encompass all aspects of the revolution that should be actively pursued and monitored. The checklist consists of six categories (depicted above), with various additional elements each. These categories are: be broad about it, approach from all angles, talk about the future, change by changing, take one step at a time and build on 21st century technology.

This thesis report represents the result of a graduation project for the master programme Strategic Product Design at the Delft University of Technology carried out in collaboration with KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. This project aims to find out how to create the desired experience for KLM passengers during undesired disruptions. This problem has been tackled with the use of the Double Diamond approach enriched with the ViP approach. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is the flag carrier airline of the Netherlands with the ambition to become Europe’s most customer-centric, innovative and efficient network carrier. To achieve this ambition, they have to make significant steps forward. KLM decided to do this by striving for operational excellence, creating a long term sustainable growth with products that both stimulate efficiency and provide customer intimacy. At their new department, Operation Decision Support, they embraced this by becoming more data-driven by creating tools to optimize the operation of KLM.
While the airline industry is progressively optimizing and KLM is facing strong competition, there is one area that remains relatively uncharted. What happens to the passengers when disruptions occur? There are many types of disruptions, varying from individual level to operational level. Unexpected mass disruptions, often caused by bad weather, are challenging to solve and result in disastrous customer experience results. During these unexpected disruptions, the Net Promoter Score, which measures the passengers’ satisfaction and thus the loyalty for the firm drops drastically. To increase passenger satisfaction, KLM should improve their service recovery when operational disruptions occur. This can be done by giving the passenger their ‘perceived justice’ which depends on the offer they get, the procedure and the interaction. Pinpointing the needs of the passenger is unfortunately very difficult since every passenger is different: they have different mindsets and travel for different occasions. With the use of a qualitative research method; adaptive storytelling, the passenger needs are found and translated to the perceived justice framework. The presented solution offering the perceived justice to the passenger is called ’Emma’, an automated, digital, ground attendant integrated into the KLM application. She enables passengers to solve their disrupted journey by pro-actively sharing information, offering solutions and giving recommendations. This application is equipped with cognitive abilities; natural language processing, machine learning and intelligent automation to create a personal and tailor-made experience via a mobile device. The application ‘Emma’ shows the potential to increase the NPS score and therefore, the passengers’ satisfaction during operational disruptions. ‘Emma’ includes many features that enable the passenger to be in control, gives them the feeling of being taken care of and shows the responsibility of KLM by giving detailed and transparent information, giving personalised rebooking options and showing tips to spend their waiting time better. Creating an application requires the involvement and resources of third parties. This takes time, and therefore, the implementation plan is separated in two years. The first year is focussed on aligning the different teams within KLM and building the features with the available internal resources. The second year, the application will be extended and further optimised with the use of third-party resources. This will enable KLM to launch a service that will be relevant in the future and give the passengers a satisfying service recovery during unexpected operational disruptions.

The urgency to innovate for organisational survival has become increasingly recognised, with the result that innovation has conquered a position high on the management agenda. However, the unfamiliarity around innovation poses a challenge for innovation management. No unique solution exists to building a successful innovation approach, such that firms are forced to experiment with innovation approaches. In analysing the innovation approaches of four large international organisations we find that these organisations share an essential common element: the presence of one or more ‘visionary innovators’ who are determined to lead a movement towards organisational change.
The graduation assignment presents a theoretical framework to illustrate four core characteristics of a visionary innovator, based on empirical evidence. The visionary innovators possesses traits to discover and realise innovations, business and political know-how, the ability to create and share a vision and space to realise that vision. Furthermore, to aid visionary innovators in leading change towards innovation in large-scale organisations, a design is proposed.