Exploring the future of hybrid working through experimentation
Bringing the spirit of experimentation to employee experience
CLIENT:
KFC South Pacific (Yum! Brands subsidiary)
THE CHALLENGE
Like many workplaces around the world, KFC South Pacific faced a period of rapid adaptation in the face of Covid-19 restrictions, particularly at its headquarters, known as the Restaurant Support Centre (RSC). Overnight, around 300 employees based at the RSC went from working fully onsite to completely remotely as they continued to provide crucial services to more than 630 restaurants across Australia.
But with the prospect of returning to the office in some form emerging, KFC’s People and Culture team saw an opportunity to use this next shift in ways of working to create a new vision of what it means to work at KFC RSC.
OUR APPROACH
Doing with, not to
Partnering with a small, cross-functional team of enthusiastic KFC people, we applied our approach across three phases:
Raising employee voices to understand employee needs and highlight what’s important for the future
We built on existing insights about how the pandemic had affected KFCs’ people, through a mix of virtual and in-person workshops. These workshops both placed RSC people at the heart of the future of KFC work and acted as a visible demonstration of the organisation’s commitment to making a meaningful change.
Designing and implementing experiments to test parts of the future experience and confirm value
We ran three experiments across six teams to test hypotheses about what the future of work at KFC could be:
What’s needed to make flexible reduced working hours successful?
How might self-guided tools and techniques help improve work outcomes?
How could we reinvigorate employee recognition to better connect gratitude to KFC culture?
Each experiment was designed to involve different departments and cover a diverse range of work styles and team dynamics, give voice and involvement to a broad set of employees across seniority and role type.
Video diary studies, paper-based diary studies, interviews, observation and surveys helped us gather rich insights from participants. These opened a window into what it was like to work with these new parts of the employee experience in place and what would be needed to successfully bring the future of work to life at scale across KFC RSC.
Defining the next steps to continue momentum
Based on the experiment results, we worked closely with the People and Culture team to identify the best path to continue to realise the benefits of the experiments. This path gave leaders a clear set of recommendations and next actions to support scaled implementation and adoption of the employee experience aspects introduced through the experiments.
“The people at KFC’s RSC are so diverse, we knew there was no single best answer to our challenge. These experiments let us tap into the ingenuity of individuals to find out what it would take to make a future of work at KFC that could succeed at scale. STCK showed us how to use design practices, building a hypothesis we could test and show value, all in ways that helped bring everyone along for the journey.”
OUTCOMES
Crafting a future that sticks
Built capability in and demonstrated the value of fostering a learning culture through experimentation
Supported stakeholder buy-in for a new future of work across divisions and leadership levels
Validated features of the future workplace experience, including:
strategies to empower employees to unlock their own version of a fully-flexible work week
more meaningful ways to support a strong culture by expressing gratitude for behaviours rather than outputs