Unlocking Strategies for Improved Employee Well-being and Creativity

The average working adult in the
Netherlands spends about 42,5 years
of their lifetime at work. To make this
experience as pleasant as possible,
employees spend time finding an
organization that can provide a good
fit and support their needs. Many
organization play into that by
providing an Employee Experience
(EX) that appeals to potential
employees and helps retain them
once they join the firm. However,
creating a good Employee
Experience can be quite challenging
due to the necessity to take into
account numerous factors such as
reward structures, team composition,
skill development, and more.
Creating successful EX can provide
organizations with happy workers that
are more engaged, more creative, do
superior work, and that are more
likely to continue working at the firm
(Ragan & Carder, 2019). With
creativity being an important driver of
an organization’s innovation capacity,
building a strong EX strategy may
provide interesting new opportunities
for influencing the organization’s
performance.
In this thesis, the relationship
between two aspects of Employee
Experience
– well
-being and
creativity
– is explored. Starting by
examining well
-being and creativity
theory I developed a conceptual
model. This laid the groundwork for
the investigation of the context of the
client company Thinkwise and paved
the way for identifying various design
opportunities for positive change. The
design opportunities laid the
foundations for a design intervention
shaped to embody, enable, and
implement an EX
-strategy that can
boost the innovation capacity of
Thinkwise.
The design opportunities that could
boost creativity and wellbeing at
Thinkwise constitute various new
behaviours that need to be enabled
for individual contributors, middle
management, and top management
.
– Individual contributors need to be
supported in maintaining high
levels of motivation;
– Middle managers can support this
by improving the ways in which
ideas are conceived, managed
and implemented, and;
– Top management needs to
actively manage the creative
climate in the organization to
support the creative and innovative
efforts throughout all layers of
Thinkwise.
The proposed intervention supports
these objectives by providing tools
and strategies for supporting idea
creation, idea sharing, building an
understanding of creative processes
and clarifying the roles and activities
that contribute to an innovative
workplace. It consists of a poster
describing the stages of the creative
process, a tool for evaluating ideas, a
document that captures the tools and
specific context and theory insights
that can be used to help define EX
strategies