Step Two Designs

We (heart) staff

Written by James Robertson, published August 30th, 2012

Categorised under: Intranets

We’re at the UX Australia conference this week, and it’s a great event. One of the key themes from day one is the need for empathy and compassion for users, and the importance of spending time in their world.

When the majority of speakers (and participants) talk about “users”, they typically mean “customers”, the people who buy products or consume services.

We work almost exclusively within the enterprise, and for us, “users” means “staff”. We’re tremendously lucky to spend time with them as a part of our projects. It’s an incredible experience to go out into frontline and operational areas, and to talk to nurses in wards, operators in call centres, engineers in refineries and sales staff on the road.

For more than ten years, our observations and insights from these staff have driven our creation of strategies and designs. And it leads us to say:

We (heart) staff

These are the staff that get the actual work done. They often do so in challenging environments, and under considerable pressure. Despite the often poor tools provided to them, they make things happen, each and every day.

When it comes to delivering great intranets, effective collaboration spaces and productive mobile interfaces, these are the staff that count.

Intranet folk share our passion

We work with intranet teams and other enterprise folk across hundreds of organisations. Time and time again, we’ve seen that their passion is also to help staff get their work done.

This keeps them going in a job that is often high on effort, and low on recognition. It leads them to take on long and hard projects to fix intranet problems that cause staff grief.

This is, in our opinion, the greatest strength of intranet folk.

It’s also their greatest weakness, leading them (too often) to accept projects that are almost impossible, because “someone has to do it”.

This underlying passion is why we keep encouraging central teams to get out from the desk and into the field. It’s needed to deliver great enterprise solutions. Just as importantly, it also reminds teams why they do what they do, and who they’re doing it for.

It’s great to care about customers, but we think it’s equally important to care about staff.

This is our passion, and we think it’s yours too.

Tags: Intranets, needs analysis, staff