Performance by Design: Maximizing the Employee Experience

2026 Gold Brandon Hall Excellence Award — Best Custom Content

A global healthcare organization believes exceptional customer experiences start with exceptional employee experiences. That belief drove the Company’s Global Employee Experience team to create 7-6-5, a design-thinking model that helps project leaders build employee-centricity into their processes and practices. The Company partnered with Innovative Learning Group (ILG) to develop a scalable learning solution that equips project leaders to apply the model consistently in their day-to-day work.

Situation

The Company had successfully introduced its 7-6-5 model through two-day training bootcamps, giving teams the opportunity to learn the approach and apply it to real work. Participants practiced using the model’s 7 experiences, 6 lenses, and 5 design steps on actual projects. While the bootcamps were effective at building capability, their reach was limited.

For an organization operating in roughly 100 countries with thousands of employees, the bootcamp approach couldn’t realistically reach every site or provide support to every current and future project leader when they needed it. The Company needed a way to extend the same practical discipline and application-focused approach of the bootcamp into a format people could access when the situation called for it: short, self-paced, and available to anyone leading a project, anywhere in the organization.

Solution

ILG and the Company’s Global Employee Experience team created Performance by Design: Maximizing the Employee Experience, a six-module e-learning course with one introduction module followed by one module for each design step. The modules take about 5 to 10 minutes each to complete, with the full course requiring less than 45 minutes. The content is organized by the project phase, providing learners with the information they need when they need it instead of trying to cover everything at once. As they progress through the modules, learners are guided step by step and encouraged to apply the model to their own projects.

Several design decisions helped make the course concise, engaging, and easy to apply:

• One story carries throughout the entire course. Instead of restarting with a new example in every module, learners follow one team as it “redesigns onboarding” across the course. That continuity makes the learning easier to follow: learners don’t have to keep re-orienting themselves, and each new concept builds on a situation they already understand.
• Feedback is specific, not generic. In the Team module, learners choose from 10 possible team members to fill six roles. Every incorrect combination — whether the learner includes the wrong person or leaves out the right one — produces targeted feedback. That level of detail may not be obvious from the course’s length, but it transforms a simple knowledge check into meaningful practice for making real project decisions.
• Every module connects back to the learner’s own project. Each module closes with a “Make the Connection” activity that asks learners to apply that design step to a project they are actually leading, then save and print their responses. The learning continues even after the course is completed as learners leave with a resource than can use immediately on the job.

Results

Performance by Design turned a two-day, in-person training bootcamp into a 45-minute, on-demand course that every current and future project leader at the Company can access. Within six months of the English launch, French and Chinese translations expanded that access across the Company’s global workforce.

Early feedback showed the design was working in practice. Reviewers described the finished course as “Amazing, engaging, looked great!” While the course is simple, the feedback reinforced that the design and development team had created an experience that aligned with what employees need, expect, and are most likely to remember.

The course also kept the most valuable element of the original bootcamp: application. Project leaders complete Performance by Design with a personalized plan that applies the model to a project they’re already leading.

Beyond this initiative, the project established a repeatable approach for future learning solutions: focus on the content that matters most, guide learners through the material step by step, and provide frequent opportunities for learners to apply new concepts to their own work.

To learn more about how Innovative Learning Group can create custom learning solutions to help improve business results, contact us at info@innovativeLG.com.