Design Thinking for HR: Crafting Employee-Centric Services

It’s time to stop designing HR services for HR’s convenience and start designing them for the people who use them – your employees.

For too long, HR has clung to processes and policies that make sense on paper but frustrate the humans they’re meant to serve. Annual review forms no one understands, recruitment steps that drive candidates away, one-size-fits-all training that employees quietly ignore – these are symptoms of an HR approach stuck in the past.

The bold truth is that traditional HR practices often treat employees as cogs in a process, not as customers of HR services.

This needs to change, and design thinking is the framework to do it. HR leaders who embrace human-centered design can transform clunky HR transactions into intuitive, engaging experiences – and the payoff isn’t just happier staff, but measurable business results.

Companies that heavily invest in employee experience achieve more than four times the average profit and twice the average revenue of those that don’t (Medium). In fact, organizations where HR is seen as a true value driver are 5 times more likely to be using design thinking in their work (AIHR). The message is clear: putting employees at the center of HR service design isn’t a “nice to have,” it’s an imperative.

Chapters

• Breaking the HR Norms: Think Like a Designer, Not an Administrator
• Design Thinking 101: A Human-Centric Process to Reinvent HR
• Step-by-Step: How HR Teams Can Kickstart Design Thinking
• Design Thinking in Action: Real HR Transformations
• Data Doesn’t Lie: The ROI of Employee-Centric Design
• New Models to Guide HR’s Design Thinking Efforts
• Crafting an Employee-First Future in HR

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Breaking with HR Norms: Think Like a Designer, Not an Administrator

Most HR departments have been built on an administrative, compliance-driven mindset. Policies, protocols, and efficiency ruled the day.

But in an era of hybrid work, talent shortages, and sky-high employee expectations, HR must become experience architects. This means challenging some sacred cows.

Why do employees have to navigate 5 different systems to get simple answers? Why are we still expecting new hires to read a 50-page PDF on day one?

Today’s employees – especially digital-native Millennials and Gen Z – won’t tolerate services that feel like a bureaucratic runaround. They expect the same ease and personalization from workplace services as they get as consumers from top tech brands. If HR doesn’t deliver, people disengage or leave.

Gallup estimates that low engagement now costs the global economy $8.8 trillion in lost productivity – about 9% of GDP (Speakap).

The upside is just as striking: when companies redesign employee experiences with a human-centered lens, they see tangible gains in engagement, satisfaction, and innovation. For example, a Salesforce study found that stores with top-tier employee experiences generate $87 in sales per hour worked, vs. just $57 for those with poor experiences (Cerkl). And simply shifting to a more employee-centric approach can boost profits per employee by 45% according to that research.

The takeaway for senior HR leaders? It’s time to apply the same rigor to employee experience that your company applies to customer experience. Design thinking gives HR a method to do exactly that.

Design Thinking 101: A Human-Centric Process to Reinvent HR

Design thinking is a problem-solving framework that starts with empathy for the end-user and ends with solutions tailor-made to meet their needs. Instead of designing HR programs around internal policies or org charts, design thinking forces us to design around the employee’s perspective.

At its core, it’s about observing and understanding people – their tasks, pain points, emotions – and creatively experimenting to improve their experience (AIHR). This approach isn’t yet standard in HR, but it should be.

HR’s role is inherently human-centered, and design thinking simply provides a repeatable approach to put people’s needs first. It transforms HR from a process-oriented function into a people-oriented one.

Here’s an overview of the classic design thinking process and how each stage can be applied in HR, with concrete examples:

1. Empathize – Walk in Employees’ Shoes

Everything starts with empathy. In the empathize phase, HR teams deliberately step out of their corporate mindset and into the daily experience of employees.

This means spending time talking with and shadowing employees to understand their reality. For example, if you’re redesigning the onboarding process, sit with new hires and observe what confuses or delights them in their first weeks.

Conduct focus groups or one-on-one empathy interviews where you ask open-ended questions like, “Can you tell me about a moment when you felt most supported at work, and why?” (Applaud). Encourage employees to tell stories about obstacles they face (“What was the most frustrating part of getting help from HR when you had an issue?”) and listen for the emotional undercurrents.

In one company, HR trying to improve learning opportunities held candid focus groups and discovered many employees felt existing trainings were “boring corporate tick-boxes” that didn’t fit into their busy schedules. By immersing in employees’ day-to-day reality, you will uncover the unvarnished truth about what isn’t working.

Other empathy tools can help here too – persona creation (sketching fictional employee archetypes with names, roles, goals, and pain points) and journey mapping (visualizing an employee’s step-by-step experience for a process, from their point of view). For instance, a journey map of the internal promotion process might reveal that a key pain point is “not knowing where I stand or how to grow” leading up to annual reviews.

Empathizing means stepping into employees’ shoes — just like the First-Time Manager Journey Map above, where each swim-lane reveals what they do, feel and need, and the emotion curve turns those highs and lows into visible insight. By the end of the Empathize phase, your HR team should have captured an equally vivid set of raw pain points, desires and unmet needs—the essential fuel for innovation.

2. Define – Pinpoint the Real Problem to Solve

In the define stage, the aim is to distill all those insights into a clear problem statement that will guide your solutions. Crucially, this problem statement must be framed from the employee’s perspective, not the HR department’s.

It’s a classic mistake to define the problem in HR-centric terms like “We need to reduce call center inquiries by 40%.” That might be your goal, but design thinking flips the script: what is the employee actually needing or struggling with?

A human-centered reframing of that example would be: “Employees need a simple, self-service way to get information about our benefits without frustration.”(AIHR). Notice how this statement focuses on the user’s need (easy access to info), not the organization’s need (fewer calls). That reframing turns the problem from an efficiency issue into an experience issue.

In our training example, after empathy research you might define the problem as, “Employees are eager to develop new skills but lack training options that fit into their busy, interrupt-driven work weeks.” A well-defined problem statement should make anyone in HR who reads it immediately think, “Yes, that is the real issue we need to solve.” It should also be specific: identify which employees, what need or pain point, and why it matters. One useful tip is to articulate the point of view: e.g. “Mid-career engineers need a transparent growth path and frequent feedback, because without it they feel stuck and disengage.”

By clearly defining the challenge in human terms, you set yourself up to generate solutions that actually hit the mark. This stage often benefits from visual clarity – for example, some teams create a simple infographic or poster that states the core problem and illustrates it with an employee persona or quote, to keep the team focused. However you do it, defining the right problem is half the battle in design thinking; it prevents you from wasting effort solving the wrong thing.

3. Ideate – Brainstorm Bold, Employee-Centric Solutions

Now the fun part: ideation. With a sharp problem definition in hand, the HR team (ideally a cross-functional group including managers and a few employees themselves) generates as many ideas as possible to address the defined need.

This is a time to suspend practicality for a bit and encourage creative, divergent thinking. Techniques like brainstorming sessions, sketching, “worst idea” exercises (sometimes suggesting absurd solutions helps spur real ones), and mind mapping can help teams break out of the usual HR mindset. 

The key is to keep the employee persona and problem statement visible to everyone so ideas stay anchored in solving for that person. For example, say our problem definition is that mid-career engineers need a clearer growth path and regular feedback.

Some ideas might include: a peer mentoring program pairing engineers with senior technical coaches; a gamified skill progression app; quarterly “career check-ins” instead of annual reviews; a self-service portal where engineers can find gig-projects to build new skills, etc.

No idea is too wild at this stage – list everything from incremental tweaks to moonshots. In one real brainstorming at a telecommunications firm, HR and employees co-created dozens of ideas to improve learning engagement, from bite-sized mobile training modules to an internal “Learning Hackathon” event.

That ideation ultimately led them to pilot short, 15-minute video lessons delivered weekly (an idea that resonated strongly with employees who had little free time). It’s important to foster a spirit of collaboration and openness in this stage – often the best innovations come from combining the perspectives of HR, IT, front-line employees, even customers.

💡Tip
It can help to invite a few “outsiders” – e.g. someone from the UX design team or a frontline employee known for candor – into the ideation session. They often spark fresh thinking.

By the end of Ideation, you should aim to have a handful of promising solution concepts. The goal is not to pick “the one perfect answer” immediately, but to choose a few ideas worth exploring further in the next stage.

4. Prototype – Build Scrappy Experiments to Bring Ideas to Life

Talk is cheap – design thinking demands action. In the prototype stage, HR teams take their top idea(s) and create tangible, low-fidelity versions of the solution to test with real employees.

The mantra here is “prototype early, prototype often.” Don’t waste months perfecting something in a vacuum; build a quick mock-up and get it in front of users. In a product context, a prototype might be a rough app interface or a cardboard model – in HR, a prototype could be a draft workflow, a role-play exercise, or a simple clickable demo of a new HR portal. The key is that it’s just realistic enough to gather feedback.

For example, if you’re reimagining the parental leave experience, your prototype might be a one-page “welcome to leave” guide plus a dummy version of a self-service portal for leave requests. You could then run a scenario with a few employees who plan to take leave soon: have them use the materials and portal as if it were live, and observe where they stumble or what questions they ask.

One HR team at a large transportation company prototyped a revamped hiring process by role-playing as job applicants – they had team members go through the new application steps and even a mock interview via video, uncovering several awkward steps which they then refined.

Prototyping in HR can also involve launching a small pilot program in one department. For instance, test a new performance check-in process with the IT team for one quarter before rolling it out company-wide.

Modern HR technology can greatly accelerate prototyping. Using an employee experience platform like Applaud, for example, you could quickly configure a dummy self-service portal or a workflow for a new HR service and release it to a small group of employees for feedback – all without writing custom code.

The prototype stage is iterative: treat each version as an experiment. Build a little, test it, learn, and tweak. It’s far better to discover in prototype that employees find your new HR portal confusing than after you’ve fully launched it.

Keep prototypes simple and cheap – a sketch, a slide deck, or a basic online form can do the job. And importantly, be open to what you’ll hear next – because some of your ideas will fail in testing, and that’s a good thing.

5. Test – Gather Feedback, Learn, and Iterate

The test stage is where the rubber meets the road: you expose your prototype to real users (or as real as possible) and see how it performs. In HR, this often means letting a small group of employees try the new process or tool in their normal work context and collecting their feedback.

It’s crucial in this phase to create a safe space for honest feedback – reassure participants that negative feedback is gold. Observe how employees interact with your prototype: What mistakes do they make? Which questions keep popping up? How do they feel during the experience (confused, delighted, indifferent)? 

Quantitative data helps too – if you piloted a new onboarding flow for 50 new hires, measure outcomes like time-to-productivity or new hire turnover versus the old approach.

Expect surprises. For example, when IBM’s HR team tested prototypes for a new performance management system, they didn’t assume they knew best – they actively co-created the solution with employees, even letting employees choose the name of the new system via vote. This testing and co-creation led to a final product, “Checkpoint,” that employees felt ownership of, and IBM saw higher employee engagement as a result.

The test phase isn’t a one-and-done. It often reveals that your prototype needs tweaks or that one of your ideas didn’t fly with employees at all. That’s okay – it’s far better to iterate now than to fully launch a flawed service.

In design thinking, testing and prototyping are cyclic: you refine the prototype (or even go back to ideate on what you learned) and test again, each cycle getting closer to a solution that truly works.

Ultimately, an idea “passes” the test phase when it solves the employee’s problem in a real-world setting and is validated by the users (“Yes, this made my life easier!”). At that point, HR can proceed to implement the new solution at scale, knowing it’s grounded in real user insight.

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Step-by-Step: How HR Teams Can Kickstart Design Thinking

If the above sounds conceptual, let’s ground it in actionable steps. Here’s a simple roadmap HR leaders can follow to start using design thinking to uncover real employee pain points and design better experiences:

1. Pick a High-Impact Focus Area: Choose one HR service or process that employees frequently struggle with (e.g. internal helpdesk inquiries, parental leave, performance reviews). Don’t try to boil the ocean initially – start where a redesign could really matter. Secure leadership support by highlighting employee complaints or data about that process.
   
   
2. Assemble a Diverse Design Team: Form a small task force that includes HR staff and people outside HR. For example, include a few employees from different levels who’ve lived the experience, a manager, maybe someone from UX or communications. This cross-functional team will bring fresh eyes and keep the process grounded in reality.
   
   
3. Research and Empathize Deeply: Map out the current “employee journey” for the chosen process. Interview and observe employees going through it. Conduct short surveys or diary studies. Aim to identify the key pain points and emotions at each stage. As you gather insights, create simple personas or profiles to summarize different employee needs. (For instance, “Dana – new hire, frustrated by information overload on day one.”)
   
   
4. Define the Problem Clearly: As a team, review the research and agree on the employee-centered problem statement you’re trying to solve. Write it down in one sentence. Ensure it reflects an employee’s need or frustration, not an HR metric. This statement will be your North Star.
   
   
5. Brainstorm Solutions Freely: Hold an ideation session (or a few). Use techniques like brainwriting (everyone writes ideas individually, then shares) or “Crazy 8s” (sketch 8 ideas in 8 minutes) to spark creativity. Encourage even wild ideas – at this stage volume is more important than feasibility. Then vote or discuss to narrow down to a few promising concepts.
   
   
6. Build a Quick Prototype: Choose the easiest way to make each top concept tangible. This could be a mocked-up screen, a role-play script, a paper brochure, or a small pilot rollout – whatever lets employees experience a slice of the idea. Don’t over-invest time; a prototype can be rough as long as it conveys the concept.
   
   
7. Test and Learn: Put prototypes in front of employees similar to your target user, even if it’s just five people. Ask them to complete tasks or react to the new design. Collect feedback through observation and direct questions (“How did this compare to your current experience? What did you find confusing or helpful?”). Identify what needs to improve. You might iterate through a couple of prototype versions based on feedback.
   
   
8. Implement in Phases and Monitor: Once you have a solution that tested well, roll it out to the wider organization. Still keep a feedback channel open – design thinking doesn’t stop at go-live. Measure outcomes (e.g. usage rates, employee satisfaction scores, time saved, reduction in complaints) to quantify impact. Celebrate quick wins and keep iterating as new needs emerge.
   
   

Following these steps, HR teams can make design thinking a repeatable habit rather than a one-off project. The beauty of this approach is that it’s scalable – start small, prove the concept, then apply it to more complex challenges. And as you build more employee-centric services, you’ll likely notice a culture shift: HR staff become more naturally empathetic and innovative, and employees start to feel the difference – that HR is truly on their side, designing with them in mind.

Design Thinking in Action: Real HR Transformations

The theory sounds great – but does it really work in practice? Let’s look at a few real-world stories where HR used design thinking to drive meaningful change:

IBM Reinvents Performance Management through Co-Creation

IBM, a company of over 300,000 employees, realized its traditional annual performance review was hindering agility. HR leaders decided to apply design thinking to create a better system. Instead of HR designing in isolation, they co-created the new process with employees from the start. They gathered extensive employee input – even using internal social platforms to ask what people liked or loathed about performance reviews.

HR produced video mock-ups of potential concepts and solicited feedback, iterating multiple prototypes of a new continuous feedback system. Employees were invited to pilot the changes and ultimately even to name the new program (the winning name was “Checkpoint,” chosen by employee vote)aihr.com. This level of involvement was unprecedented – and it paid off.

When Checkpoint rolled out, it was already embraced by the workforce as their creation. IBM reported increased usage of the feedback tools and credited the venture with higher employee engagement, as people felt more ownership over their goals and growth. The IBM case illustrates that when you design with employees rather than for them, you get solutions that stick.

Coca-Cola GBS Creates a Human-Centered HR Service Experience

At Coca-Cola, leaders realized that their internal HR services (like payroll, benefits, helpdesk) were too oriented around internal procedures rather than employee needs. In 2013 they flipped the script – treating Coca-Cola’s own employees as customers of HR and applying service design principles to improve their experience (Academia).

They mapped out employee “journeys” for key services and identified many friction points where the process was designed for HR’s convenience, not the user’s. For example, they found that employees had to navigate multiple siloed systems to get simple queries answered – a byproduct of organizing services by internal departments.

Using design thinking, Coca-Cola brought together cross-functional teams to redesign these services end-to-end from the user’s viewpoint. They created service blueprints and prototyped new consolidated platforms incorporating intuitive digital tools (inspired by the ease of consumer apps).

The result was a seamless, one-stop service experience that was easier to navigate and “just made sense” to employees – incorporating mobile access, personalized support, and clear guidance at each step. The impact was dramatic.

After reorganizing services around employee journeys, Coca-Cola saw a significant increase in employee engagement, satisfaction, and productivity metrics internally.

By moving away from cost-first thinking to experience-first design, the company proved that happier employees are also more efficient and effective.

Telecom Company Boosts Learning Participation

In a large telecommunications firm, HR was tasked with upskilling the workforce for new services – but employees historically showed low enthusiasm for corporate training. Applying design thinking, the HR team started by surveying and interviewing employees about their learning preferences (AIHR). They discovered many felt existing trainings were too long, poorly timed, and not relevant. Armed with these insights, the team defined the challenge as “employees need learning that fits into their flow of work and feels personally valuable.” 

They brainstormed dozens of ideas and decided to prototype a new approach: micro-learning modules delivered in 15-minute sessions, accessible on-demand. They ran a pilot where a group of employees could choose short video or interactive lessons on topics they were interested in, at convenient times.

HR monitored the engagement data and gathered feedback – the response was overwhelmingly positive, with employees saying they loved the flexibility and brevity. On rolling this out, participation in voluntary training shot up and many employees quickly gained skills for the expanding services, directly supporting the business goals. This case shows how understanding employees’ real barriers (time and relevance) led to a creative solution that achieved what mandatory training mandates could not.

These examples scratch the surface – many forward-thinking organizations are using design thinking in HR to tackle challenges like improving the recruitment journey (one transportation company’s HR team mapped the candidate journey and cut out redundant steps, resulting in more candidates accepting offers and faster hiring, enhancing diversity and inclusion efforts (by empathizing with the experience of underrepresented groups and co-designing initiatives), and beyond.

What they all have in common is a shift from an “HR-knows-best” mentality to an “employee-as-customer” mindset. HR teams became facilitators and listeners, harnessing employees’ ideas and energy to craft solutions – and the outcomes have been powerful. Design thinking in action generates not only better HR services, but also a sense of buy-in and trust, because employees see their voices directly shaping their workplace. In short, it’s good for people and good for business.

Data Doesn’t Lie: The ROI of Employee-Centric Design

Skeptics might ask: is all this touchy-feely design stuff really worth the effort? The data says yes, emphatically. When you improve employee experiences, the ripple effects translate into hard results.

We’ve already noted that companies strong in employee experience financially outperform peers.

Consider these evidence points as you make the business case for design thinking in HR:

• Higher Productivity: Happier, engaged employees get more done. In a landmark experiment, University of Warwick researchers found that making workers feel happier led to a 12% spike in productivity (University of Warwick). They even cited Google’s internal findings that investing in employee support drove up satisfaction by 37%, which “under scientifically controlled conditions, really pays off”. Design thinking helps uncover what makes employees’ daily work lives easier – and removing frustrating obstacles can unlock significant efficiency.
  
  
• Better Retention and Talent Attraction: Employee-centric design directly combats the factors that drive people to disengage or quit. According to a study by Salesforce, creating a unified, positive employee experience can increase revenue by up to 50% – in part because engaged employees stick around to contribute and build stronger customer relationships (Cerkl). Conversely, poor experiences fuel attrition; for example, if your internal tools and processes feel archaic, your best young talent may flee to companies with more intuitive environments. It’s telling that in a recent survey, 37% of global HR leaders said they plan to invest in employee experience platforms in the next year (Unleash) – a sign that organizations recognize how critical EX is to winning the war for talent. One more sobering stat: a speaker at PwC noted that managers today face 51% more responsibilities than they can handle, while only ~50% of employees trust their organization (Cerkl). Rebuilding trust and engagement through better-designed work experiences is becoming non-negotiable.
  
  
• Customer Experience and Bottom-Line Growth: There’s a well-documented link between employee experience and customer experience. Happy, engaged employees create happier customers, which drives revenue growth. A study in the Harvard Business Review found that companies that excel at employee experience appeared twice as often in the American Customer Satisfaction Index and enjoyed significantly higher profits (Medium). As I noted in Unleash, HR can learn from the design thinking behind great customer experiences – “HR must design experiences around the needs of employees, particularly as different demographics have different preferences,”. When HR services are intuitive and supportive, employees are freed up to be more creative, productive, and customer-focused, creating a virtuous cycle of good experiences inside and out. In fact, an analysis by PwC and Applaud quantified a 397% ROI over three years from investing in employee experience initiatives, largely due to time savings, reduced turnover costs, and productivity gains. While individual results vary, the direction is consistent: designing HR with employees in mind drives real economic value.
  
  

In summary, making HR employee-centric is not a fluffy HR trend – it’s a smart business strategy backed by research. Lower turnover, higher engagement, more innovation, faster adoption of change – these are the dividends of a better employee experience.

And design thinking is the mechanism that allows you to systematically achieve those improvements. As one HR leader put it, “Employee experience is the new battleground – get it right, and you unlock performance; get it wrong, and you’re bleeding talent and money.” Data and case studies increasingly back this up.

New Models to Guide HR’s Design Thinking Efforts

Adopting design thinking in HR might feel like a big cultural shift. Fortunately, there are frameworks and models that can help structure your efforts and keep everyone speaking the same language.

Here are two frameworks – fresh ways of organizing design work – that HR leaders can use to embed an employee-centric approach:

Double-Diamond HR Innovation Model

Originally popularized by the British Design Council, the “double diamond” is a simple visual map of the design process divided into four phases: Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver.

It’s called a double diamond because each pair of phases forms a diamond shape – first you open up (diverge) to explore the problem, then narrow (converge) to define it, then open up again to ideate solutions, then narrow down to deliver.

HR teams can adopt this as a guiding model: in the first diamond, Discover means empathizing with employees (research, interviews, observations) and Define means pinpointing the core employee-centered problem.

In the second diamond, Develop covers ideation and prototyping of possible solutions, and Deliver corresponds to testing, iterating, and finally implementing the solution.

This model reminds your team to first solve the right problem, then solve the problem right. It’s a handy framework to ensure you’re not jumping to solutions before truly exploring needs.

Many HR practitioners find the double diamond easy to grasp – you can print it as a one-pager to orient any new project. It emphasizes that divergence (creative expansion) and convergence (focus and decision) are both critical.

So, next time you kick off an HR initiative – say revamping manager training – try mapping your plan to the double diamond: Are we still in discovery mode? Have we converged on a definition? It brings discipline to the creative chaos of design thinking.

Employee-Centric Design Maturity Model

As your organization commits to human-centered design, it’s useful to evaluate where you are on the journey and what to strive for next. A maturity model lays out levels of capability from basic to advanced.

Here’s a simple four-level maturity model for employee-centric design in HR:

1. Process-Centric – HR operates on policies and assumptions with minimal employee input (unfortunately, where many traditional HR teams sit).
   
   
2. Emerging Empathy – HR has started gathering employee feedback (e.g. surveys, focus groups) and fixes obvious pain points, but on an ad-hoc basis.
   
   
3. Integrated Design Thinking – HR consistently uses design thinking methods for major projects; employees are regularly involved in co-creating solutions; journey mapping and personas are common tools.
   
   
4. Experience-Led & Adaptive – The highest maturity, where employee experience is embedded in every HR decision, and the organization continuously iterates on services based on real-time feedback and data. At Level 4, HR behaves like a product team for the employee experience, with ongoing experimentation and personalization (much like how a customer experience team would operate).
   
   

The practical use of a maturity model is to assess: Where are we today, and what do we need to do to level up?

For instance, if you self-identify as Level 2 (you gather feedback but don’t yet prototype solutions with employees), your next step might be to train HR business partners in design thinking and pilot a full design sprint on one HR challenge, moving you toward Level 3.

The maturity model provides a framework to benchmark progress and set goals. It helps rally your team around the idea that “this is a journey – we might be at basic empathy today, but in a year we aim to be truly design-driven.”

Many organizations find that as they climb to Level 3 or 4, HR’s relationship with employees transforms – HR is no longer perceived as bureaucrats, but as trusted designers of solutions, and that reputation feeds a positive cycle of trust and innovation.

By leveraging models like these, HR leaders can provide structure to the change. They serve as common reference points – whether you’re explaining to your team how you’ll approach a problem (using the double diamond) or discussing with the C-suite how advanced your employee experience efforts are (using the maturity model).

The goal is not to get hung up on theory, but to use frameworks as tools to guide practical action. They ensure that in the excitement of trying new design methods, you don’t lose sight of process and outcomes.

And they signal to the organization that HR is taking a systematic, strategic approach – not just throwing design buzzwords around, but building new muscle in a measurable way.

Crafting an Employee-First Future in HR

Design thinking is more than a toolkit – it’s a mindset shift for HR from “process enforcers” to “experience designers.” Embracing this approach means being bold enough to question longstanding practices and humble enough to involve employees in developing something better.

It demands we as HR leaders ask tough questions: Would our employees pay to use our services? If not, why? How can we make the experience so intuitive and empowering that they would?

It challenges us to run HR like a product business – continuously gathering “user feedback” and iterating to improve our offerings. This can feel disruptive, even uncomfortable, to an HR function used to executing annual plans and policies. But disruption is exactly what today’s workplace demands. As Applaud’s own ethos emphasizes, it’s about being human-first, intuitive, and employee-led in everything we do.

The ideas in this chapter have been opinionated because HR needs a jolt – a push to see that “business as usual” is fast becoming obsolete. The next generation of workers will simply not engage with clunky, top-down HR. And frankly, we shouldn’t expect them to. The opportunity before us is exciting: by adopting design thinking, HR can reinvent itself as the champion of employee experience, the department that crafts journeys and interactions employees genuinely love.

Imagine your company where onboarding feels like a warm welcome tailored to each individual, not a bureaucratic checklist. Where internal HR portals anticipate what an employee needs in the moment, rather than making them hunt for information. Where policies are designed with empathy, so they not only protect the company but also treat employees like trusted adults. These are not pipe dreams – they’re achievable outcomes when you put employees at the center of your design process.

In closing, I challenge you as a senior HR leader to think like a product designer every time you tackle an HR project.

Ask: Who is my user? What’s their experience today and how could it be better? Engage them, co-create with them. Be willing to pilot, fail, and try again. Build those feedback loops.

Your HR team might just find new energy and purpose in the process – designing with empathy is actually quite rewarding. And your workforce will definitely notice.

When employees see HR initiatives that clearly reflect their input and make their lives easier, something magical happens: trust grows. Engagement grows. People start to believe what leadership has been saying all along – that our people are our most important asset – because the everyday work environment finally reflects that sentiment.

Design thinking for HR is about crafting employee-centric services that inspire and empower. It’s a journey of continuous improvement, but it begins with a simple commitment: to never again design anything for employees without empathizing with them first.

Make that commitment, and you’ll be on your way to building an HR function that is not only disruptive and innovative, but also deeply human and intuitive. In other words, exactly what modern enterprises need HR to be.

The question now is, are you ready to lead this change? The employees you serve are certainly ready for it. Let’s delight them.

How Applaud Helps You Make It Happen

At Applaud, we believe employees are a company’s most important customers. That’s why our technology is built entirely from the employee’s point of view—delivering more human, intuitive, and rewarding HR experiences that empower HR teams to do more for their people.

If you’re ready to turn employee-first HR from vision to reality, we’re here to help. Get in touch to see how Applaud can transform your HR Service Delivery and create a workplace where employees truly thrive.

About the Author

Duncan Casemore is Co-Founder and CTO of Applaud, an award-winning HR platform built entirely around employees. Formerly at Oracle and a global HR consultant, Duncan is known for championing more human, intuitive HR tech. Regularly featured in top publications, he collaborates with thought leaders like Josh Bersin, speaks at major events, and continues to help organizations create truly people-first workplaces.