Over Engineering Employee Experience

When I was traveling around the United States and Canada I stayed in various styles of accommodation. What I found quite frustrating was that none of the bathrooms I encountered seemed to have the same system for dispensing water through the shower rose or initiating a toilet flush. I got to wondering—who were the people designing these? Was their mandate to try and confuse the user in preparation for a candid camera skit? Because if that was the case, nine times out of ten, they met that brief for me.

Why did it need to be so complicated? The shower and toilet system in my house was likely designed in the 1940s, and it did the job. I was all for reducing water usage, half-flushing cisterns, and more luxurious shower roses—but from a user experience perspective, couldn’t I just turn a tap or press a button? Don’t even get me started on the sensor-initiated toilet flush—WHAT was that all about?

Having worked in engineering consultancies, the term “over-engineering” came to mind. “The client just wants a workable solution, and we’re over-engineering the problem”.That certainly seemed to be what those bathroom fitting designers were up to—but there was a niggling suspicion that it was also happening in my own profession. While we had tried to keep everyone happy embedding hybrid working, had we failed to lay the strong foundations? Had the promise of engaged and mobile employees failed to deliver? I believed it had—and certainly, in part, due to the overcomplicating of the solution.

It was never a one-size-fits-all situation when dealing with people—but did it need to be as complicated as surveys, policies, ratings, 360 feedback, and diagnostics?

People were individuals with different values and needs. As such, a blanket policy to mandate how they should work was never going to deliver the desired result. Even the so-called “guidelines” that some companies tried to covertly use to slot people into boxes were falling well short—serving only to drag engagement lower rather than lift it higher. When you sat down and communicated with those in your organisation, you likely found they just wanted a system that worked. And if that meant taking it off paper and engaging with people individually, that may have been the simple solution we were choosing not to see. People wanted to be treated as individuals—people whose ideas and personal circumstances were valued.

Remembering that for two years, we had encouraged people to do whatever they could to make working remotely productive, I wondered: why did we now need to start mandating aspects of that arrangement? There might have been good reasons—but none, in my view, that warranted entirely new policies (every argument I had heard was already covered in some way by existing policies and processes).

Building and maintaining an engaged team didn’t need to be over-engineered. Talking and listening was likely the right design for the best user experience.