Human Resource Design: steering human-centred innovation within private organisations

This research aims at investigating collaborative practices that make use of design tools and methods within organisations. In particular, the study focuses on private organisations and contributes to the comprehension of how service design could be applied to ‘contextual factors’ of project teams in order to enhance collaboration. In the last decades, much attention has been focused on investigating the effectiveness of service design and design thinking in increasing innovation in the solutions produced by the design process internally and externally, with regard to the organisations, namely the ‘content’. Less exploration instead has been addressed towards understanding how the design process both influences and is influenced by the way the people involved interact, behave and grow. All these aspects regard what I identified as the ‘context’ and represent the focus of this research. In doing so, the study faces the demand of Human Resource Management functions to adapt to major changes in the organisational structures. This demand is increasing due to the major changes that the labour market is undergoing and that are affecting the employee-organisation relationship. Those changes are driven by global forces like: demographic transformations that are increasing the level of diversity in the workforce; the diffusion of digital technologies in all aspects of work; the evolving expectations of the younger generation on the experience of work and the general acceleration of the rate of change which requires organisations to adopt ‘agile’ configurations to better suit the velocity of the internal and external market (Bersin by Deloitte, 2016; Bersin, 2017). The so-called ‘agile’ organisations are made of fluid structures where teams are dynamically assembled according to the specificity of each project. This kind of configuration inevitably implies an increased level of flexibility and adaptability of employees, who find themselves collaborating with a large number of people within the organisational context. As a consequence of these changes, interactions among workers and between workers and organisations are transforming, spawning a series of inquiries that concern the ways in which those interactions should occur and develop in the most advantageous manner, both for the company and the employees. Private organisations therefore express a greater demand for consultancies for solutions and interventions aimed at innovating the way employees work. This request is often considered as a ‘design thinking’ issue and tackled without a structured practice specifically dedicated to redesigning collaboration and internal behavioural dynamics. This study proposes a framework that defines a dedicated course of action, based on design features, that can be adopted by private organisations aiming to make the first step towards an internal transformation. The framework represents guidance especially for undertaking projects related with organisational change, which mainly appeal to Human Resource Management departments. Moreover, the research contributes to the configuration of a set of new skills required for the professional designer who is called to tackle and guide a process of transformation within a company.