Boosting Employee Creativity & Wellbeing

Change Management & Employee Experience

Project Overview

Thinkwise is a company that develops software solutions for other organizations. They joined me in this project to learn more about strategies they could use to help boost employee creativity and wellbeing. User Research and Creative Facilitation played a strong role in identify various Employee Experience (EX) strategies

My Contributions

This was my thesis project, so I was responsible for all the contributions. About 20 people that work at Thinkwise, and 6 experts in the fields of creativity and wellbeing participated in the research and design processes that led to the final EX strategy.

Thinkwise Project

Strategic Designer

Dec 2022 — June 2023

The average working adult in the Netherlands spends about 42,5 years of their lifetime at work. To make this experience as pleasant as possible, employees spend time finding an organization that can provide a good fit and support their needs. Many organization play into that by providing an Employee Experience (EX) that appeals to potential employees and helps retain them once they join the firm. However, creating a good Employee Experience can be quite challenging due to the necessity to take into account numerous factors such as reward structures, team composition, skill development, and more. Creating successful EX can provide organizations with happy workers that are more engaged, more creative, do superior work, and that are more likely to continue working at the firm (Ragan & Carder, 2019). With creativity being an important driver of an organization’s innovation capacity, building a strong EX strategy may provide interesting new opportunities for influencing the organization’s performance.

Read the thesis here: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:50d7cce5-3ba2-4c38-90b0-f21c842446fd

Working at the intersection of environment, psychological wellbeing and creative ability

Understanding the intersection of these aspect helped me investigate the state of wellbeing and creativity at Thinkwise.

Then Pipeline

After various creative sessions with participants from Thinkwise, we came to an understanding that rather than a lack of ideas and creative opportunities, there is a lack of resources, support and creative climate that would allow ideas to not just stay ideas, but also be transformed into developing these ideas further so they can be implemented. Particularly the creative climate was deemed important, which is the environment at work that makes people more or less prone and able to act creatively.

Prototyping a solution

To support this process of implementation, I developed a toolkit, which contains a reflection tool for Thinkwise that can be used in meetings but also individually to come to an understanding of how the idea can be improved, a visual to create an understanding of the creative process, and a document containing specific insights about ways to improve the creative climate at Thinkwise.

Boosting Employee Creativity & Wellbeing

Working at the intersection of environment, psychological wellbeing and creative ability

Then Pipeline

Prototyping a solution

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