In this Talent Tales episode, talent.imperative Founder Nicole Dessain had the honor to interview Jennifer Dewey , Global Talent Management Lead at BASF Colors & Effects.
Jennifer’s creative superpower is “flexibility”. She has always been very flexible in her approach and mindset which certainly is evident in her impressive career trajectory.
Jennifer graduated with a degree in social work and was a case worker where she ran a very lean team and learned how to problem solve on a daily basis. After a while, Jennifer was looking for more development opportunities. So she decided to interview her friends to learn about related fields where she still could work with people. That’s how she discovered Human Resources. Her first job was as a Recruiting Coordinator. From there, she worked her way up by keeping an open mind about new opportunities which included working in different geographies including in Asia.
For the last eleven years, Jennifer has worked at BASF.
Jennifer discovered design thinking as part of her late night Google searches where she was looking for inspiration for career development in a turbulent time when her business unit BASF Colors & Effects was undergoing a divestiture. She concluded that conducting career development as usual did not have the needed flexibility to meet the needs of an ever changing business climate.
That’s when Jennifer discovered talent.imperative’s unique “Career Design” program which was inspired by the “Designing Your Life” and “Working Out Loud” concepts.
Jennifer started to introduce the program globally. Initially, the qualitative design thinking method was met with some skepticism among the scientific and engineering workforce because it challenged their very analytical way of thinking with a more creative approach.
After just running a few workshops with employees and leaders, Jennifer has already seen a shift in behaviors. Unlike other classes, participants have taken immediate action steps. For example, managers from the first leadership workshop took the initiative to set up lunches with employees outside of their department to get them started on their career design conversations. At this point, 40-50 lunches have been conducted – all initiated by leaders of the organization, not by HR. During these conversations, leaders learned about what is going on in employees’ minds in these times of uncertainty and employees felt supported and listened to. It also widened everybody’s network which in turn enhances internal career development opportunities.
Here are some of Jennifer’s tips for how to get started with design thinking in HR:
Co-create with employees.
Instead of looking at work from an HR perspective, start by putting yourself in your employees’ shoes. Ask yourself: ‘What do the employees think about this program/change?” Then, ask them and be open to feedback and ideas.
Review your current HR programs from an employee-centric lens.
Which of your HR programs might need to be infused with employee experience? What works, and what doesn’t?
Start small and learn from experiments.
You don’t have to start with a huge initiative. A grassroots mentality can help the cause when it resonates with people and they start to spread the word which is a more organic approach than leadership or HR forcing a new program on employees.
Want to find out more insights on how to leverage design thinking in times of uncertainty? Watch the entire interview on YouTube or listen to the Podcast.