Shortlist of our open.ex-lab.de Library
Clickbait alternative: 5 resources that you will need to propel your employee experience in 2022.
We recently opened our internal library up, and since it contains 100+ resources it can be quite overwhelming. With these monthly shortlists we want to make it more accessible to you. This first shortlist is all about skills and tools that we think are essential to people & employee experience designers now and in the near future.
Communication is at the core of all employee experiences.
Non Violent Communication Online Course
We are firm practitioners of Non Violent Communication and see the effect and value it brings almost every day, certainly in every training and project workshop we host or facilitate.
There is something so alluring about a quiet straight-forward method, like the 4 steps from Rosenberg, that is so easy to understand but takes so much practice to master it.
While this online course does not charm you with great usability, an engaging interface or modern learning approaches, it delivers a solid experience, heavy with content and the weekly emails keep you on track. Stick with it. It is for free.
https://www.notion.so/exlab/NVC-Introductory-Course-bb100f33951d4c07a7ce162b222e1727
Virtual Collaboration Mural Tutorial
Efficient and effective virtual collaboration will be the cornerstone of almost any activity, and we cannot imagine a world without digital whiteboards anymore. May it be for jotting down ideas in a meeting, visualising meaningful content in trainings or structuring big projects.
Mural is our weapon of choice. This resource is special, because we use it almost every week to onboard partners, participants and collaborators into our preferred digital whiteboard.
It is the most precise and relevant piece of video that we came across. It gives the intro to two of the most used behaviours in Mural: Zooming & panning + creating sticky notes. It is less than a minute and that is the critical function of it 🙂 We send it out in onboarding emails, post it on welcoming boards and it gives us a peace of mind.
https://www.notion.so/exlab/Tutorial-for-MURAL-beginners-YouTube-d5070abf16164aa78860365025f8aabd
Employee Journey Mapping
Journey mapping is a centerpiece method we employ in almost all our design projects for various purposes. We use it to plan and synthesise research, to develop fields of opportunities, cluster personas and to generate ideas. As you can see, it offers a lot of use cases, yet it is rather simple.
So, we had a look at EVERY Employee Journey Mapping course that is out there, or at least on the first 5 pages of Google, which is basically, what is out there 🙂 and there is not one course that we feel comfortable recommending to you.
So, a good old article by Hannah McKelvey and Jacqueline L. Frank. It’s long, it’s a journal, but it is just so much better than all the clickbaity stuff you can find and goes to minute detail about the method but also the project they used it on.
OKRs and Self-organization
While there are many books out there on OKRs and Holacrazy they all lack concreteness and don’t really offer a glimpse behind the curtains, into the bowl of an organization.
Rik Matena from Springest gives a detailed account how they work and implemented OKRs in a company running on Holacrazy framework. While it is centered in a software production context, I found the insights also valueable for organisations outside the digital product space.
Scaling Creativity
Leveraging the potential of everyone in the organization is an absolute goal of every employee experience activity. Unleashing your own creativity and the one of your colleagues is undeniably part of that.
So we have been watching and reading a lot of stuff about being creative and using your creativity in a what you might call non-creative field, like business and there is a lot of good things out there, but nothing has resonated quite like this talk by George Kembel about scaling creativity, empowering many people to gain access to their inherent power.
Stay with him, it is not super coherent and polished but there is a ton of inspiration about cultivating creative practices.
