DANFOSS:  Digital employee experience at Danfoss

Danfoss is a global manufacturing and engineering company producing a range of products and solutions that promote energy efficiency and comfortable climates in building, and a less wasteful supply of food.

The company is complex, with a highly diverse workforce of 28,000 individuals working across 100 markets and a range of different divisions, some built up through acquisition. With a strong heritage of innovation stretching back to 1933 and a friendly, inclusive culture driven by still being family-owned, Danfoss is committed to providing a strong digital employee experience for its global workforce.

But with multiple locations, a high proportion of blue-collar workers and a complex digital landscape with multiple applications in use, producing a compelling digital workplace is challenging.

Mapping the key user journeys

The very busy Digital Employee Experience team has already delivered a custom-built intranet based but sought external help in order to define the next phase of the digital workplace, focused on helping employees get things done.

The team engaged Spark Trajectory to objectively map and understand the user journeys around some of the most common tasks carried out by employees throughout Danfoss. How did employees use the systems they had to complete everyday tasks? Where were the pain points, what was working well and what opportunities were there to improve?

Understanding user journeys

Working closely with the Digital Employee Experience team, we used our Task Trajectory framework, carried several detailed key stakeholder interviews and over 20 user interviews from all across the world. Recording, codifying and analysing over 25,000 words of interview data resulted in a deep understanding of how employees complete everyday tasks.

We reported back our findings to the team in a report and presentation with general recommendations. We then went into a deeper analysis identifying hundreds of user stories which were then grouped into 23 major user journey and categorised into separate ‘super journeys’.

Working closely with the team we then mapped out 18 of these in detail, with process diagrams, reactions to success and failure, opportunities to improve and many more features. Each user journey map, available as an A3 wall chart, also comes with a RACI matrix to drive accountability and governance, as well as a measurement and improvement plan.

Defining the next phase for the digital workplace

Presenting our findings back to the Digital Employee Experience team and then to the cross-functional steering committee, is helping stakeholders to think more holistically about the digital employee experience across different functions and systems. Having authoritative, user-driven data is also helping to drive a consensus on the next steps for the digital workplace. 

Spark Trajectory research has also given the team a very detailed set of actions to improve the intranet and its content that will help users get things done through a personalised, task-based experience. Process and product owners can also optimise the digital employee experience and plug any gaps.