Measuring human value in the workplace with Future Friendly

Products and services impact people's wellbeing, regardless if they’re designed to or not. In March 2021, Future Friendly tasked a small team of Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation (BCII) students to design a measurement tool to define human value and re-assess what it means to have a successful product. Undertaking this real-world challenge for their Industry Innovation Project (IIP) subject, across 10 weeks the students dove into the challenge space; researching and prototyping a solution before they presented their final innovative framework, which throws traditional KPIs out the window. To uncover the project journey and the collaboration between industry partner and student team, we interviewed Johnny Rogers, Partner – Organisational Design at Future Friendly and three BCII students in the team; In Gyin Lwin (BCII/IT), Dan Paje (BCII/Science) and Olivia Grasso (BCII/Product Design).

What were your reasons for engaging with this project?

JOHNNY ROGERS: We have been a long-term partner with BCII and proudly have graduates as members of our team at Future Friendly. The BCII students bring an infectious energy to our team with their desire and comfortability to take on big complex challenges.

DAN (BCII student): I voted to be a part of the Future Friendly Project as I was interested with the idea of trying to impact the future of work and workplaces through making human values more well-known and accepted as proper business metrics.

OLIVIA (BCII student): As a Product Design student, I was instantly drawn to Future Friendly's project. I knew I wanted to work on a project where I could test my knowledge and acquired skills over the past 3 years of my core degree, in the industry I would soon enter and this was the best opportunity to do exactly that.

We have been consistently impressed by the growth mindset students display – it is a core skill we look for in new talent that isn’t necessarily that easy to find.

– Johnny Rogers, Partner – Organisational Design, Future Friendly

What were your key learnings from undertaking this project?

IN GYIN (BCII student): My biggest takeaway was the value of teamwork and team building through the ups and downs we experienced. Working with Future Friendly…showed me that working rapidly and communicating frequently is the key in progressing an idea; a key lesson I will be taking into future projects.

DAN (BCII student): The insight that I will be taking away from this project is the confidence I have to be leading others in these sorts of high-pressure situations, as well as learning how to pace myself to make these projects great.

JOHNNY ROGERS: [Future Friendly’s] values and lived experience in this space has led us to always push our partners to think bigger than traditional metrics – to think about the human change everyday products and services can make. We had begun to distil this way of thinking into a framework that could be used by any team anywhere to elevate the measurement around their product/service. The problem we had was that it only existed as a concept, not a tangible or actionable tool that could be used on the ground. Our BCII team took on that big challenge, which is imbued with all the shades of grey that come with measuring human value and gave us a workshop format that could be run by any team today to align and define human value around their project.

What have been the benefits of participating in the Industry Innovation Project?

JOHNNY ROGERS: Broadly speaking, [Future Friendly staff] are passionate about design education having previously run our own design school and firmly believe for our own team one of the best ways to master our own skills is to coach them to others. In this particular project simply getting to work together with the [BCII student] team has been a huge pleasure.

Collaboration is a term that has become watered down and is often confused with groups of people reaching consensus. However, in high performing multidisciplinary teams it is characterised by their ability to change their minds many times over – these teams constantly challenge and push each other’s thinking. It’s this practice that drives new ideas and it is this behaviour that means multidisciplinary teams are bonded, resilient, can make decisions for themselves to move quickly and innovate. For the team that’s fun and rewarding and for business it is a competitive advantage.

This experience definitely made everything feel more real and made the work we did feel valuable and tangible, and not just like a uni project.

– In Gyin, BCII student

DAN (BCII student): The major benefits that I have learned from working with the industry is the amount of connections I have to different industries and seeing our past three years of BCII schooling being practically used for something meaningful.

OLIVIA (BCII student): The greatest benefit of engaging with Future Friendly on our project was having the ability to work side by side with their team. This ultimately enriched our project as each aspect was directly influenced by the vast array of knowledge each expert had within our problem space. [Future Friendly’s] care for us as a team and the project was clear as each meeting we had was completely collaborative and they made all their tools accessible to us from day one.

What would be your advice for future partners?

JOHNNY ROGERS: The BCII course necessarily frames the industry partner as a ‘client’ and the student team as the ‘vendor’. It can be easy to fall into those roles in the formal sense but our experience has been that breaking down that formal structure and working as a blended team gets the best results and makes for the most rewarding experience for all involved.

Many thanks for the Future Friendly team who engaged with the students for their Industry Innovation Project in Autumn 2021 supporting their learning, and congratulations to the student team (In Gyin Lwin, Dan Paje, Olivia Grasso, Tariq Ho and Lachlan Cash).