The last few years have been filled with change and challenge. It seems like we’ve experienced it all, from rising costs, to major shifts in the technology industry, to a pandemic. It’s easy to focus on just getting through these challenges as an individual, but as researchers we felt it was important to checkin with our co-workers, and really understand how they were coping with all this.
The hope was to enable stakeholders to leverage these insights for the purpose of better empathizing with employee experiences.
For about 6 months a cross-functional team of researchers led by Indi Young, a world-renowned qualitative data scientist, met with employees from all across the organization and listened to what they had to say about change and challenge. From the dozens of listening sessions we conducted, we synthesized their feedback into four distinct categories called thinking styles.
Thinking styles are deeply-researched, demographics-free mindsets that do not represent specific people, but instead represent patterns of inner thinking, emotional reactions, and guiding principles. These particular thinking styles were derived from deep listening sessions focused around specific moments in time when an employee was experiencing change or challenge at work.
The following are the four thinking styles we uncovered in our research: