HR leadership at a major international shipping and logistics company wanted to improve service delivery and employee experience by increasing self-service HR options.
An international shipping and logistics company's HR leadership team needed to reimagine employee services but faced the classic distributed-team challenge: how do you innovate when your people span multiple time zones, traditional multi-day workshops don't fit anyone's calendar, and the logistics of bringing everyone together are prohibitively expensive?
The existing HR service model was requirements-driven and system-centric, leading to implementations that checked technical boxes but failed to serve actual employee needs—particularly for complex scenarios like family benefits navigation and new hire onboarding.
We introduced an unorthodox rapid-iteration model designed specifically for globally distributed teams: daily two-hour virtual collaboration sessions instead of marathon workshops, continuous idea refinement between sessions using collaborative digital tools, and user-centered design methodology focused on two detailed personas rather than abstract requirements documents.
Over six weeks, the distributed team developed journey maps for a regional sales executive preparing for a second child and a finance manager recruiting a replacement for a retired team member. By walking through these specific scenarios, the team identified pain points, documented emotional journeys alongside process steps, and shifted focus from "what systems do we need?" to "what experience do users need?" This reframing generated "How Might We" statements that prioritized opportunities based on user impact rather than technical feasibility alone.
The approach delivered six measurable user outcomes (Hills, in IBM Design Thinking terminology) and complete future-state service designs—all without requiring expensive travel or week-long workshop commitments. The self-service workflows dramatically reduced HR workload while improving employee experience, particularly for the two priority use cases.
More broadly, the engagement proved that globally distributed teams can innovate effectively without traditional workshop logistics. The rapid-iteration model became replicable across other transformation initiatives, and the user-centered approach shifted how the organization thought about service design: from requirements gathering to experience optimization.
The engagement succeeded by matching the methodology to the constraint. Daily two-hour sessions fit into busy calendars better than multi-day workshops. Persona-driven design made abstract service concepts concrete and testable. Most critically, focusing on user experience rather than technical requirements prevented the team from building systems that met specs but failed to serve actual needs.