Saturday, March 19, 2016

Towards personalized processes (for employees)

My assumption is that if we dive deeper in human centered process design (as described in my previous post), and research people that work in processes, we will find similar findings as user-centered designers do when they research customers:
> People are different in many ways, for instance in terms of needs, preferences, skills and behavior

Product and service delivery companies have struggled with this, and the big shift from industrialized homogeneous delivery to modern days have been personalisation and mass customization. You might argue on the extent that companies have been able to really reach this, but I think that this shift towards personalized services will continue. And also that the human centered approach to design of products and services will further grow - to meet personal individual needs of people in better ways.

Now, that's interesting. As BPM-consultants we typically define processes aimed at standardization. We want processes to be simple, consistent, the same for all (in the same role & swimlane of our nifty process models). Some process designers do not even have a clear picture of the employees, and will design jobs from a very generic perspective.

But if we want to help create work environments which engage, motivate and even help employees thrive, we need to take the individuality of employees into consideration, even put in central.
My assumption is that if we look deep into humans in the role of employee, we will find:
1. Generic human traits and needs that apply to all
2. Traits and needs for particular groups of people (persona's)
3. Pure individual traits and needs (the individual employees in your process)

As process designers, if we strive to fully engage each and everyone employee in process execution, we will need new methods and approaches to design processes that can address all these 3 levels.
In my opinion, this could be the dawn of the personalized process: processes that are able to tune in to each employee's unique traits and needs, and create a working environment that triggers that person's motivation, need for meaning, engagement and perhaps happiness.



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