In this Talent Tales episode, talent.imperative Founder Nicole Dessain had the honor to interview Danielle Crane, Chief Talent Officer at GreenPath.
Danielle’s creative superpower is connecting humans and ideas.
Danielle describes herself as “the girl who almost didn’t enter HR”. She quit her first HR internship after 48 hours. Her career counsellor challenged her to try for another internship and encouraged her to help design what HR might be versus the reactive function she initially experienced.
Danielle was first exposed to design thinking by her CEO who had used it previously and brought it with her when she joined GreenPath. Danielle was intrigued by how she might apply this method for complex problem solving with her internal customers – leaders and employees.
In her own practice, Danielle combines design thinking with behavioral economics principles when designing HR programs at GreenPath.
One very relevant example of how GreenPath applies these methods: A year ago they used the immersion technique to move one third of their employees to work remotely. The company was able to capture key lessons learned and recently apply them when all were instructed to work from home three weeks ago due to the Coronavirus crisis.
Another way Danielle and her team have used design thinking is for Benefits plan design. Danielle used journey mapping to identify new hire pain points. One that stood out was benefits enrollment. The team learned that new hires were not enrolling in retirement savings because they received so many other communications when they started their job. Plus, the barrier of logging into yet another system, setting up a user password, etc. was just too high and so it fell through the cracks for many new hires.
Once the pain point was identified using a design thinking method, then the team applied the behavioral economics principle of reducing friction by adding an auto-enrollment to their benefits plans. Through this intervention, employee enrollment increased from 38% to 84% over a three-year period. They also dove deeper into the fact that most employees seemed to determine 3% as their savings percentage. Through research interviews with employees the team discovered that that percentage seemed randomly determined and so the design team applied the behavioral economics principal of defaulting to apply an automated savings rate of 7%. What they found was that once employees started contributing at that rate, they tended to stick with it.
The team did not stop here. They used persona design and uncovered a common need among two segments of their workforce: employees who were also going to school and new parents. The common need? Sleep deprivation! So, GreenPath decided to provide a rest and relaxation room that employees can book to relax or take a nap in. In their communication they then tied the benefit to the need that was evident in these two persona groups.
Overall, Danielle has seen an increase in engagement from employees because they are being asked to be part of a solution to a need they have.
Want to learn more about GreenPath’s remote work immersion experiment? Watch the entire interview on YouTube or listen to the Podcast.