Enabling operational excellence in the workplace.
Experience Town is a virtual town concept which helps realize the Novartis shared vision to become a truly people centric business and deliver long term positive outcomes for their organization.
As Novartis’ own ‘metaverse’, its deliberately flat hierarchy and ‘frontier town’ ethos promotes a safe and inspiring place for participation, creativity and empathy-driven contribution. All aimed at helping solve the employee experience pain points that block their cultural evolution towards Inspired, Curious and Unbossed.
At the heart of this experience transformation are their employees. Putting their needs first is vital in implementing new business strategies and innovation programs that are crucial components of a positive and future facing organization.
Novartis are delivering this vision through Experience Town. Founded on the principles of the Experience Mindset and structured around the Experience 5D Framework: a curated set of methods and tools helping to root people-centricity into their business.
And to make certain they're designing the right solutions for their people, Experience Town leverages the power of Design Thinking to ensure Novartis is creating products and services that solve the right problems for their people.
The Founding principles
Collaboration Working across the organisation to include all perspectives and points of view and approach problem solving from all angles. Sometimes breaking down silos by stepping out of ones comfort zone can feel scary, but the outcome is always greater when we do.
Participation Encouraging everyone in the company to embrace an empathy-led mindset –contributing and adding their voice to shape the future of the organisation.
Engagement Supplying a wonderful, seamless experience to attract and reward associates who take part in the research initiatives.
Sustainability Believing that the next experience evolution, to chime with ‘Gen Z’ expectations, is sustainable innovation. It assumes problems can be solved by existing internal solutions - focusing on what’s working well, what makes our exemplars successful, and using their best-in-class solutions. The result? Not reinventing the wheel, breaking silos, removing duplication, transparent access to knowledge, learning and sharing lessons. Initiatives become quicker to implement, use in-house knowledge and do not require external input or extensive investment to be effective.
Change adoption is boosted further when generated from grassroots ideas, via ‘influencer’ communities displaying living proof. For us, this embodies the experience lifecycle thinking needed to embed sustainability in every part of our lives.
Experience Movement
ExperienceTown has a flat structure, connecting horizontally across divisional and geographical silos, so associates can collaborate, experiment, create and learn. It underpins our cultural aspiration to be an Inspired, Curious and Unbossed organization. Associates can register as Citizens, whose active contribution drives up their status ranking and rewards. Accessed from our virtual Research Center ‘building,’ Citizens become willing study participants – offering a range of demographics.
Citizens can be invited to contribute in several ways, from surveys to focus groups, receiving non-monetary virtual rewards for their time. Each Citizen profile is linked to their corresponding Enterprise Persona – forming a powerful research lens into audience needs. Initiating research from Persona preferences, provides a powerful way to empathize with the people we’re creating solutions for. This is the Experience Mindset we want to inspire in every associate, to help us reimagine medicine.
Experience 5D Framework
As a capability catalyst to embed the Experience Mindset, we’ve internally developed a framework which creates a unique hybrid model, leveraging the key features of Design Thinking (validate early then iterate), Agile UX (deliver solutions often), Human Centered Design (place people at the core) and Lean UX (focus on business outcomes). Associates can digitally access the Framework by onboarding their initiative to Project Tower in Experience Town. To help boost capability, we launched an Experience Curriculum, giving key influencer teams the tools to become ambassadors within their networks.
Enterprise-wide programs who used a people-centric approach
Experience benchmarking is critical to understanding pain points, at significant moments in the employee lifecycle. Our recent Experience Index (EXI) participation was an important spotlight to focus efforts and leverage Experience Team support, to raise scores. This enabled us to mobilize experience coaching on several global strategic transformations. We leveraged the Experience Town platform to spin up Novartis’ response to the Covid pandemic. In this case, experiment groups and community engagement helped define our approach to ‘Choice with Responsibility’ - the future of hybrid and flexible working.
Data insights
Since November 2020, our Experience Town Citizen base has been steadily growing on a daily basis. We aim to reach 15% of the Novartis population by mid-2022. New research study requests are received weekly in Research Center, as are projects digitally on-boarded to Project Tower and, many hundreds of associates have embarked on the Experience Capability journey.
What our client says
I am really excited to be part of an organization which is embracing a people-centric mindset, to improve people experience - unleashing the power of our people throughout their journey at Novartis. This is industry leading!" – Dan Rose, Head Customer & Technology Solutions, Operations & Strategy - Novartis