Design Thinking can help businesses return to the office | Opinion

COVID-19 and the pandemic have taught us many new lessons about the workforce, productivity and work/life balance.

As we enter the second year of the pandemic, many businesses have still not fully returned to the office and many continue to struggle with how to successfully transition back to normalcy or to consider whether that is even possible.

Manhattanville College’s Center for Design Thinking recently completed a project with a mid-sized business looking at its workforce, evaluating its productivity and weighing what next steps the company could or should take in this new hybrid world.

Looking at employee e-mails pre and post pandemic, the design thinking team was able to analyze not only productivity but changes in work habits. Many employees were in fact more productive at home, the flexibility allowing them to work at the hours of their choosing. While some employees thrived, others did not, losing focus when they were not part of a more structured environment. These difference were not only based on the individual employees’ habits, but also had to do with the role they played in the company.

The CEO of the company said the Design Thinking Project helped him see things in a new light. He said that next steps might involve a survey of the employees to learn about their perceptions and preferences.

Design Thinking is not a new concept, but it is one that continues to elude definition for many. That is probably because it is so flexible and can be applied to help solve almost any problem.

As director of this new exciting program at Manhattanville College, I am amazed at the ways that our students have used this methodology, not only to solve problems but to change the way they think, making them more valuable assets when they enter the workforce. We have incorporated Design Thinking into many of our departments, most notably our School of Nursing and Health Sciences.

Design Thinking is a people-oriented approach to solving problems using observation and empathy to look at something with new eyes and then come up with creative solutions.

Indra Nooyi, the former CEO of PepsiCo who used design thinking in her successful repositioning of the company, probably described it best in an interview with the Harvard Business Review back in 2015.

In the interview, she described her struggle to get managers to buy into the new way of thinking and how routine had robbed the company of the ability to connect with its target market. She described how she had asked top managers to create a photo album that expressed the concept of design.

“After six weeks, only a few people returned the albums. Some had their wives take pictures. Many did nothing at all. They didn’t know what design was. Every time I tried to talk about design within the company, people would refer to packaging: “Should we go to a different blue?” It was like putting lipstick on a pig, as opposed to redesigning the pig itself. I realized we needed to bring a designer into the company,” she said.

Through observation of consumer behavior and testing, Nooyi said they were able to develop new products like Pepsi Spire, a new touchscreen fountain machine, and reimage better ways to package snacks for women.

“We had to rethink the entire experience, from conception to what’s on the shelf to the post product experience,” she said.

More industries — from tech services to retail chains are gravitating toward Design Thinking because it provides clearer insight into the needs of their customers. Manhattanville College is proud to be preparing our students for this revolution in thinking which will impact all industries in the future, as well as the future of education.

Alison S. Carson is professor of psychology, director of The Center for Design Thinking, and associate provost for Academic Innovation and Design Thinking at Manhattanville College.

This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Design Thinking can help businesses return to the office