IBM Services Associates: Employee Experience Re-design
The Challenge
IBM Global Business Services (GBS) is the professional services arm of IBM, providing clients with consulting, application management and business process services. Revenue from GBS was $16.8 billion in 2018*, 21% of IBM's revenue overall. GBS serves clients world-wide in over 100 countries. GBS hires around 2,500 early professional hires a year and on-boards them through two separate programs—Consulting by Degrees (CbD) and Brighter Blue (BB). These programs were often inconsistent, gave few incentives for leaders to develop early professional hires, and had competing priorities which lead to minimal skill development of new employees. Analysis of both legacy programs identified shortcomings in the learner experience, business outcomes and program design, ultimately impacting GBS’s ability to attract, develop, retain and promote talent.
From the new hire perspective, expectations and actual experiences often misaligned. It was a challenge to get staffed on project work, and many were often incentivized to join client projects requiring skills they had little experience in. Constant pressure to bill clients, perform high in these undeveloped skill-sets, and inconsistent support from management and leadership resulted in 21% attrition globally, a loss of 6$M
In exit interviews, the number one theme: Need for structured growth, no bait and switch expectations, and appropriate career progression and compensation in relation to their performance.
Role:
Service Design Lead
Collaborated with key business stakeholders on strategy implementation. Contributed UX design artifacts, visual design kit, key strategic content, and designed ibm.com/associates website.
Service Design Lead
Collaborated with key business stakeholders on strategy implementation. Contributed UX design artifacts, visual design kit, key strategic content, and designed ibm.com/associates website.
Strategy Team:
| • Brennen Thaney – Researcher/Service Design |
| • Monica Bordoloi – Researcher/Service Design |
| • Kelly Renfro – Design Manager |
| • Kara Jewell – Program Management |
| • Kristina Scheufler – Program Management |
Our Users
Early hires are new IBMers with <3yrs of relevant experience. This group included the 15,000+ people enrolled in Consulting by Degrees and Brighter Blue programs.Note that new hires are not necessarily “straight from college” in background or age. IBM is inclusive of all backgrounds: new collar, re-entry, or non-traditional education paths, and we needed a program that reflected that. Extensive research was done on these populations, as well as Gen Z to better understand how to proof our program.
Additionally, we looked at other users in the ecosystem to ensure our program design met the needs of three key groups: associates, managers, and the business.
Painpoints
The Business- Staffing, skills: Early professionals need to align to skills and roles that lead to client value
- Attrition: Regrettable attrition is too high, driving up resource costs
- Reputation: GBS had a declining reputation on campus, making it difficult to hire the right candidates with the right skills
Managers
- Guidance and support: Challenged with providing clear and consistent career guidance. Often unclear on messaging and ways to best manage and support early hires.
- Accountability: Accountability unclear for those involved in early professional experience. Complex responsibility matrix resulted in early hires not getting the support they needed.
- Business integration: Takes too long to integrate new hires into the program, business unit, and their assigned client projects.
Associates
- Bait and switch: Lack of clarity on roles and expectations in recruiting resulted in a “bait and switch” feeling between once onboarded to the company and projects.
- Unclear career path: Career development expectations were missing. Lack of clarity around long-term career growth opportunities, progression criteria, and areas of growth.
- Staffing, expectations: Lack of awareness on staffing expectations for client projects. Mismatch on priority skills and how to adequately prepare for project work
Approach
IBM’s Enterprise Design Thinking and Agile methodologies were used to develop the core principles of GBS Associates, the new entry-level on-boarding experience in GBS.Phase 1: Research informed our strategy
- Interviewed 4 key roles across 12 geographies and analyzed over 1,000+ pages of program material to understand the current state of the early hire experience.
- Documented pain points and high points for key moments in the early professional’s experience: recruiting, onboarding, skills, early career development and progression.
- Synthesized possible solutions into a global strategy. Crafted a to-be user journey and service blueprint to communicate proposed changes. Worked with business analysts to calculate impact to the business in terms of retention, money saved, and skills matching.
- Secured buy-in and funding from Mark Foster, senior VP of IBM Services to build out a team to support further develop the implementation of the global strategy.
Phase 2: Collaborate with program leads to further define proposal details
- Held design thinking workshop to co-create more granular details for each geography
- Formed a cohesive vision of the new early professional hire experience and a set of Program Design Principles
- Secured executive buy-in from global operations team and IBM finance to protect funding for new early hire experience in all geographies for at least two years.
Solution
GBS Associates aims to integrate early hires quickly into their business unit and project teams, focusing on building their confidence in joining IBM. The experience is supported by multiple functions at both the global and location levels, including Human Resources, Learning & Knowledge Services, Compensation, Talent Acquisition, Workforce Management, Career and Skills, Talent, and others whose focus on Associate success helps ensure a holistic, consistent experience globally. Staying connected with the business has been crucial to the program's success, as more senior GBS practitioners drive apprenticeship by engaging directly with Associates as coaches and mentors and provide real-time coaching and feedback.As the service design lead, I was responsible for facilitating and contributing design work to drive our foundational program elements:
- Combined Brighter Blue and Consulting by Degrees into single brand. Collaborated with IBM legal to define program name, IP, and file trademarks.
- Created brand kit with visual guidance and value prop messaging for external marketing and recruiting assets. Brand kit is global, inclusive, and sensitive to the many cultures and geographies IBM hires in. Worked with translators to ensure our materials sounded great in the 6 major languages we hire in.
- Collaborated with Talent Acquisition to roll out the new program globally for 2020 hires. Co-designed MVP tools and processes for recruiters to go to market with the new program. Launched ibm.com/associates
- Aligned global hiring around 6 clear career paths, thus bringing in more skills.
- Changed how and who we hire, enabling the business to hire better talent faster. Collaborated with Talent Acquisition to redesigned the demand process, prototyped and designed new processes and tools for capturing talent needs world-wide.
- Gave a voice to technical roles on internal professions boards. Brought GBS representation to company-wide initiatives to focused on developing technical talent.
- Aligned global training around 6 clear career paths, ensuring the right skills are developed for current client needs.
- Collaborated with Learning & Knowledge to develop a high-level design and vision for a two-week onboarding experience. Conducted in-person observation with education partners to redefine outdated learning models.
- Aligned conversations with workforce management and compensation to ensure all early hires were being paid competitive rates in the global market.
- Established change management framework for the global implementation team. Connected individuals across their global network, set best practices.
- Created “playbooks” to guide leaders through change management and program implementation. Conducted research on key groups to understand wants, needs, and fears around the new experience to develop better messaging. Drafted content specific to user groups (partners, managers, associates) for tailored change management.
Impact/Outcomes
This new experience has been scaled and deployed globally, creating a consistent on-boarding experience for 6,000+ Associates each year in 52 locations around the world. It also rapidly pivoted to full virtual delivery with limited adverse impact as the COVID-19 pandemic struck unexpectedly.The success of GBS Associates has been measured through these key metrics in YE2020 and Q2 2021, compared to legacy programs, globally:
- Increased NPS (+40 average in Y1, +28 in Q2Y2)
- Increased utilization (+1.3%)
- Improved skills alignment (96% of Associates to "grow" or "maintain" skills domain)
- Improved brand reputation in the marketplace (+4% acceptance rate)
- Retention rate improved (+15% in Y1, +5.8% in Q2Y2)
- Consistent global execution (measured through consistent improvement in maturity)