Editorial
What’s the best way to design the modern workplace? Typically, discussions center on policy, technology or real estate. While these are necessary, we should also consider the human aspects of the experience, from the individual’s perspective.
Experience mapping has become a popular way for teams of all kinds to gain empathy for customers and employees alike in order to create solutions with a higher chance of adoption. Modeling a typical experience graphically in a diagram provides a unique, eye-opening depiction of the individual’s experience that leads to greater empathy and alignment.
There are particular variables in mapping the hybrid experience that make it slightly more challenging than one might assume at first blush. The thing is, there’s no one right or wrong way to create a map. It’s up to you, the mapmaker, to scope the effort and frame how you’ll go about mapping hybrid experiences.
Determine Your Approach
To get started in the right direction, there are four key questions to answer in determining your specific approach:
- Whose experience? Mapping begins with determining the primary actors in the experience. In the case of mapping hybrid employee experience, a multi-actor format is needed: the dichotomy between in-office and remote team members suggests that both should be considered at the same time.
- Which experiences? “Hybrid” has several different meanings. It can refer to everything from a type of employee to a hybrid session, or mixed synchronous meeting. However, in the case of the hybrid experience, it makes most sense to focus on the phenomenon of switching locations with a “day-in-the-life” view of work or an hour-by-hour basis.
- When does the experience begin and end? With hybrid work, it becomes quickly apparent that looking at one day isn’t enough. It’s really the whole week that’s interesting -- when colleagues are in the same mode, when they are in different modes and what the heck is going on on Fridays. The map needs to expand to a “week-in-the-life.”
- What is the focus? There are many aspects of hybrid work to consider. Deciding what elements to include in your map is the challenge. For hybrid, some of the variables to evaluate are:
- Worker actions and activities.
- Work location.
- Devices and technology used.
- Feelings and state of mind.
- Teammate connection points.
The scope of a hybrid experience map is best defined as a multi-actor journey reflecting a workweek with a focus on actions, location, technology, feelings and connection points.
Related Article: Employee Journey Mapping and How to Get Started
Mapping Modes of Hybrid Work
After scoping the mapping effort, the next question is how you’ll represent the information you gather about the experience in a diagram. Maps come in all flavors and styles: customer journey maps, experience maps, service blueprints, user journey flows, ecosystem maps and more.
For mapping the hybrid experience, “mode mapping,” a lesser-known technique developed by Stuart Karten Design, seems appropriate. Because hybrid workstyles require employees to switch between modes — from in-person to remote, to async to mixed synchronous, and back — the basic structure of mode maps fits with the scenario.
Rather than having fixed swimlanes, as in a typical journey map, mode maps track the activities and state of mind with color coding and icons on a single path. This line then switches between modes to indicate a shift in workstyle, in our case.
Each actor in a mode map of the hybrid experience gets represented with a different colored line. Doing this across a typical work week results in a diagram that looks like two heartbeats oscillating between remote and in-office modes of work.
The image below shows the basic form of a hybrid work map zoomed all the way out. The days of the week are in the center, with the red and blue lines representing two different actors. Three different pairings are noted: both remote, both in-office, and one in-office while the other is remote:
Looking closer, you can see how the different facets of information are represented and overlaid on the basic pulse of the day for each actor.
Keep in mind that experience maps aren’t just made up out of thin air. They should be informed by real-world interviews and observations — a key step in any mapping effort. It can be as simple as starting with six to eight hybrid employees to ask about their experiences. The map, then, reflects the patterns that you hear across interviews — the “average” of experiences, if you will. As with qualitative research of this nature, strive to validate the map you create to confirm that you’ve painted a realistic picture.
What you ask them specifically depends on the focus of the map as defined, above. In this case, you want to query about work times and locations, actions, devices and technologies, team interactions and emotions.
There’s flexibility in what gets included and how it’s represented. Just be sure to include a key to indicate the colors and symbols used. Again, there’s no right or wrong approach, just appropriate and not appropriate for your context.
Related Article: Why Mapping Employee Journeys Can Make a Better Workplace
Putting the Map Into Action
At their core, maps are about alignment. On the other hand, diagramming multiple facets of information in a single overview literally lets you see where the problems are. We can think of this as outside-in alignment, i.e., how you should design your workspace by looking at things from an individual's perspective.
But to deliver an intended experience, teams also need inside-across alignment, or an agreed understanding of what to solve for and how within the group. People can make sense of their goals together and gain consensus on what problem to solve and why.
Here’s a key point in any mapping effort: “mapping” should be thought of as an inclusive activity to get a team aligned to each other using an alignment with the individual’s experience as the starting point. The goal is to find points of intervention and levels of change that might have otherwise been overlooked, particularly from quantitative data sources like surveys.
Ultimately, it’s not about the map (noun), it’s about the mapping (verb). An experience map without a conversation is wallpaper.
As a result, the new step is to assemble a cross-functional team to review the diagram. A short two-hour workshop is often all that’s needed. Here’s a basic flow of the session:
- STEP 1: Review the diagram together to understand the basic flow, but also to gain empathy for each of the actors and their situations. Have two people from the team role-play and read the activities, feelings and devices out loud from left to right.
- STEP 2: Find pain points that are relevant to you and your organization. Ask the group to note the hot spots in the experience where people struggle. Note these along to the top or bottom in a given color. For instance, in the example diagram above we can see remote workers struggling with connection to colleagues as well as phenomena like the “triple peak day,” or coming back to work after a break in the late day to finish up into the evening, and how that contrasts with the in-office commute home.
- STEP 3: Summarize patterns of insight across pain points and the ensuing team discussion. What conclusions can you draw? For instance, from the brief analysis above, we see that office workers may actually switch devices and technology more than remote workers, moving from a desk to a meeting and to a mobile device throughout the day.
- STEP 4: Prioritize opportunities for your initiative or effort. Where are the biggest points of intervention? What rationale emerges to prioritize them?
- STEP 5: Ideate specific solutions to address the pain points and issues you identified. Follow the steps of typical brainstorming, e.g., from design thinking or similar. Validate your ideas for improvement by getting feedback from employees. For larger investments into improvements of the hybrid experience, run tests or experiments to prove your concepts.
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Your mileage may vary with any local mapping effort you run. In some cases, you may want to create several different maps to get a view into various role types or patterns of hybrid work across your organization. For instance, non-desk workers in your company may not have the option to work from a remote location, yet interact with employees who do. What does their experience look like? Similarly, you may have permanent remote workers who can’t get to an office on a regular basis. What do their interactions with others look like in a hybrid workplace?
Regardless of your approach, the point is to take a human-centered perspective on hybrid workplace design. That is, start with the individual and their experience and work back to the solution, not the other way around.
Tools around are not enough to make hybrid work — the goals and needs of teams and teamwork should be the driving force. Experience mapping is a key tool that allows you and your team to do that in an inclusive, systematic way and find solutions grounded in reality.
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