Erik Mashkilleyson

Work / Case study

Bayer

Making career development feel like a choice.

Turning a global talent programme into choices employees could understand and act on.

Digital experience strategy · Employee experience · 2018

Client
Bayer
Project
Global talent management engagement programme
Year
2018
Sector
Life sciences
My role
Digital Experience Director, Siegel+Gale EMEA
Themes
Behaviour, Culture, Technology
Sheet
25
Fig. 01
Office corridor with a wall of blue and green panels, each carrying the Y in a ring, and two people walking.
Digital and physical experiences work as one system across a global organisation.

I led the digital experience strategy for Bayer’s global talent-management transformation, turning a complex HR programme into an employee journey people could understand, navigate and act on. The work connected campaign thinking, digital platforms and physical touchpoints across awareness, understanding, action and advocacy.

01 Challenge

A global change programme people had to believe in

Bayer was preparing to launch a new approach to performance and development across a vast, culturally diverse organisation.

The brief went beyond communicating a new HR programme. Bayer wanted a holistic engagement experience capable of inspiring enduring behaviour change, designed around three audiences with different needs: HR, leaders and employees.

The context made the challenge harder. Employees were already dealing with competing corporate messages, including the Monsanto acquisition. The programme had to work across offices, functions and cultures, and encourage people to take greater responsibility for their own development.

The experience therefore had to answer a simple human question:

Why should I care about this change, and what can I actually do with it?

Fig. 02
Slide: employee pain points around a new engagement programme, including fatigue, fear of change, the new Monsanto employee base, cultural differences and corporate jargon, with quotes.
Starting with the pain points: fatigue, fear of change, cultural distance and corporate jargon.

02 Experience strategy

From HR programme to employee journey

My remit was the digital experience response to that challenge.

I structured the programme around a behavioural journey:

Awareness → Understanding → Action → Advocacy

Each stage had a different job.

Awareness had to overcome cynicism and create interest.
Understanding had to turn corporate language into something intuitive and personally relevant.
Action had to make career development easier to initiate and continue.
Advocacy had to show progress, encourage peer participation and help the new behaviours endure.

We mapped the pain points against that journey, moving people from fatigue, confusion and fear towards interest, clarity, empowerment and participation.

That journey became the backbone for deciding what content, interaction and technology belonged at each stage.

Fig. 03
Slide: the four journey phases, awareness, understanding, action and advocacy, each with its job and the pain point it answers.
The employee journey turns a change programme into four behavioural stages: awareness, understanding, action and advocacy.

03 Idea

What is Y?

The creative platform used the Y as a metaphor for moments of choice.

What is Y?
What is Y to you?
You choose.
You believe.

The Y represented the fork in the road: moments when people make decisions about their careers, development and direction.

The idea gave an abstract talent-management programme a human starting point. Career development became something rooted in personal choices and conversations.

The experience culminated in the thought:

Life at Bayer starts with You.

The concept was designed to progress with the employee journey, from curiosity about the programme through personal stories and practical action to long-term belief and participation.

Fig. 04
Slide: the core message of each phase. What is Y? What is Y to You? You choose. You believe.
“What is Y?” uses moments of choice to make career development personal.

04 Digital ecosystem

One experience across digital and physical touchpoints

A central principle was that the programme should feel like one connected employee experience.

We defined five qualities for it:

Simple. Visible. Authentic. Flexible. Fresh.

Digital channels provided scale, access and continuity. Physical experiences created moments of human interaction and made the programme tangible. The two had to reinforce each other.

The ecosystem included an intranet takeover, campaign content, AR, video, podcasts, roadshows, town halls, physical installations, employee stories and leader and HR toolkits.

At the centre of the digital experience was the Bayer app, conceived as a single touchpoint connecting people to information and ongoing career-development activity. Features explored included profiles and teams, push notifications, dialogue, goal setting, personal development diaries, progress tracking, maps for walking meetings, voice communication and peer mentoring.

This mattered because the experience had to continue after the launch campaign. Employees needed somewhere to have the conversations, set goals and see progress.

Fig. 05
Two phones showing the Ymoments app icon and a home screen with profile, dialogue, team, goals and notifications.
The Bayer app connects conversations, goals, mentoring and progress in one employee touchpoint.

05 UX

Designing the infrastructure behind the experience

The digital strategy also went down to the practical UX level.

For Bayer’s SharePoint environment, the work began with discovery: auditing the existing talent-management intranet, reviewing analytics, evaluating SharePoint solutions and understanding audience behaviour through personas.

From there, my remit covered the digital experience strategy: the role of the intranet and other digital channels, user flows, the experience roadmap, content and search requirements, information architecture, taxonomy and nomenclature, modular UX and the interface system.

The goal was to make information easy to find, give the new programme prominence and create an experience that could expand over time as new content and functionality were introduced.

The work extended through implementation oversight, ensuring the designed experience could translate properly into Bayer’s technical environment across desktop, tablet and mobile.

06 Behaviour

Designing for what people would actually do

The most interesting part of the project was treating behaviour as part of the experience design.

At the action stage, employees could initiate conversations, set goals, keep a development diary, choose where review conversations happened and take part in peer mentoring. Managers and HR had corresponding tools to support those behaviours.

At the advocacy stage, the ecosystem expanded into progress tracking, team-level development, employee stories, analytics and gamified recognition.

The digital experience therefore acted as part of the change mechanism itself.

Fig. 06
Two phones showing hand-drawn AR marks placed on a chair and inside a ball chair at home.
Tools for employees to experiment and share their stories in the places they work and live.

07 What I contributed

Digital experience as change strategy

As Digital Experience Director for Siegel+Gale EMEA, I led the digital and experiential thinking within the response to Bayer’s brief.

I translated the behaviour-change objective into an end-to-end employee journey, defined how digital and physical touchpoints should work together, developed the role of the Bayer app and intranet, mapped user flows and behaviours, and established the UX strategy for an experience capable of working across a global organisation.

The result was a framework that connected brand, employee experience and behaviour change: a campaign could create attention, stories could create understanding, digital tools could make action easier, and the experience could continue long enough for new behaviours to become part of everyday working life.

Selected artefacts

Fig. 07
The Y in a ring beside the line Life at Bayer starts with You.
Life at Bayer starts with You.
Fig. 08
Three views of a bright atrium: an empty ring on the floor, a purple tree growing from it, then a pavilion.
Concept for a Y installation in an atrium, changing over time.
Fig. 09
Two phones: a home screen with the Ymoments app and the app’s home screen.
A reason to download the Bayer app.
Fig. 10
Three phones showing AR Y marks on a city map, in an office lounge and over desks.
App use cases: walk-and-talk routes, wayfinding and team engagement.
Fig. 11
Three phones showing AR Y marks in a stairwell, an atrium and a corridor.
Spatial discovery: interactive content placed around the workplace.
01What we created
  • Digital experience strategy
  • Employee journey: awareness, understanding, action, advocacy
  • Bayer app concept
  • Intranet UX strategy and information architecture
  • User flows and experience roadmap
  • Implementation oversight
02My role

I led the digital and experiential thinking within Siegel+Gale’s response to Bayer’s brief.