Lucy Davis, Kaitlin Palmer,

Kylie Kirkham, Rachelle Lidiard,

Nate Eversole, Mary Anderson,
Sarah Edwards
15 March 2022
Executive Summary
Having pride for donors and passion for patients, Grifols desires to create a business that has
a high standard of innovation, quality, and safety. Grifols has been a top-leading plasma donation
center since 1909, where they create innovative solutions through their plasma-derived machines and
medicines to help treat millions of people globally so they can live more rewarding lives. The core values
of Grifols are “pride, safety, effort, commitment, excellence, teamwork, innovation, and improvement”
(“A Growing Business,” 2022). These values help encourage the company to maintain its high standards
and seek improvement. Currently, Grifols excels at ensuring safety and quality in their centers. With
experienced team leads in each center, they ensure a high quality experience for donors as well as
high-quality plasma for patients. Uniquely, Grifols not only supplies care to help treat rare or chronic
diseases, but there are twelve centers dedicated to creating innovative solutions to help with improving
industrial processes for the company as well as researching and developing innovative treatments for
diseases worldwide.

The Problem
Grifols follows a traditional management function where they focus on planning, organizing,
leading, and controlling, which does provide a strong backbone for companies. However, traditional
management prioritizes processes, tasks, deadlines, etc. over people which can leave employees and/
or customers feeling underappreciated and used as tools in a business, and not as a human person. This
is a current problem for Grifols centers due to unequal pay and management members showing little
concern for current employees, which leaves them feeling like disposable resources in the company.

The Solution
There is a type of management that fills in the gaps of traditional management. This solution
is experience-centric management. Experience-centric management focuses on people over business
processes, which empowers people to feel cared for by the management of the company. There are key
steps to applying experience-centric management: reframing, agile methodologies, human experience,
and measuring metrics.

Why Now?
Applying these principles now in a traditional management company like Grifols is crucial
because the business economy is moving towards an experience economy. Experiences matter more
than ever in the workplace because it is experiences that retain employees in companies. Taking steps
to move Grifols from traditional management to experience-centric management will not only retain
employees but improve the overall quality of the company and its experiences.
 Contents
Introduction​................................................... 1

Rationale & Benefits..................................2-3

Agile............................................................4-5

HX/EX............................................................ 6

Metrics .......................................................... 7

Conclusion .................................................... 8

References .................................................... 9
 Introduction
The purpose of this report is to provide a “How To” manual to assist Grifols management in
transitioning from traditional management methods and functions to experience-centric management.
The traditional management functions of planning, organizing, leading, and controlling provide
a strong backbone for companies by allowing them to develop efficiency in their already-implemented
management processes. However, there are ways in which human-focused experience-centric
management fills the gaps found in traditional management.
If we take a look at the difference between product-centric management and experience-centric
management, we see that the difference lies in the who: in experience-centric management, companies
focus more on the employees and customers as people. In doing so, companies find more meaning in
their work and build lasting connections. This is what management should be about!

TRADITIONAL MANAGEMENT

Plan Organize Lead Control

Reframing Agile HX/EX Metrics

EXPERIENCE-CENTRIC MANAGEMENT
Figure 1: Traditional management functions (plan, organize, lead, control) can be revolutionized into strong
experience-centric management methods (reframing, agile, hx, metrics).

1
 Rationale & Benefits
Impacts of Experience-Centric Management
Everyone has had personal experiences with management that they absolutely loved or
absolutely hated. These traditional management systems are effective in the sense that workplace
tasks are being accomplished, but at what cost to employees and consumers? Though oftentimes
resisted initially by companies, experience-centric management can provide a more holistic approach to
businesses. Experience-centric management is a new and improved way to work efficiently, lead a team
successfully, and see revenue increases within an organization.

Motivation and Loyalty

Experience-centric management tactics have an impact on many facets of a company’s success,
but one of the key impacts is on employee experience and satisfaction. Encouraging management to
focus on the employee experience in their leadership style will lead to “a greater sense of satisfaction,
motivation, or development” (Kayes 2002). Involving management in experience-centric training
encourages them to find their own intrinsic motivation, which will compel them to help their co-
workers find that same intrinsic motivation. This improves both quality of life and quality of work for
employees, which enhances loyalty to the company. Experiences are memorable and meaningful to
people. Implementing experience-based training on both managerial and employee levels changes the
culture of a company and increases employee satisfaction, motivation, loyalty, and development.

Financial Impacts
There are several significant financial impacts that support an experience-centric focus in a
company. By employing design thinking methodologies, companies see an increase in revenue, market
share, return on investment - often through an increase in customer satisfaction - as well as decreases
in cost. In an article from McKinsey & Company the company discusses the McKinsey Design Index,
or MDI. This value rates a business on multiple themes of design to determine their design strength.
They “found a strong correlation between high MDI scores and superior business performance” for
experience-centric organizations. Specifically, they showed higher revenues, returns to shareholders,
and TRS growth than other competitors in their industries (Sheppard 2021, p. 4). These are very
significant financial benefits that cannot be ignored and that highlight the importance of transitioning to
experience and design-centered management in an organization.

2
 Belonging
Focusing on the importance of employee experience, an article published by Forbes argues that
every organization needs human-centered, or experience-centric, leaders. Cheun Cheun Yeo states that
by recognizing that their employees are human beings with needs, company management can “elevate
organization culture and [cause a] great payoff in the long run” (Yeo 2020). If employees feel heard,
they are more likely to be open and vulnerable in their teams, creating a more efficient and successful
co-creative process. In a culture where every employee feels they belong, workplace motivation and
productivity dramatically increase.

Impacts of Experience-Centric Management

Even with the obvious business benefits to implementing experience-centric design, many
organizations may have concerns that lead to resisting these managerial changes. Companies and
employees often experience stress, but as they respond in a positive way, they may see progress
through focusing on a company-cultural value and co-creation with their employees.
Change is scary, resulting in a defensive stress reaction to the change before us. “The more
changes introduced in a shorter period of time, the more stress people [are under]” (Bruckman 2008).
This stress-based change can be avoided by encouraging co-creation, a process where real-time
feedback and input are used to ideate as a team. Since employees feel heard, they are more likely to
open up to their teammates and the co-creation process is much easier. Thus, resistance to change can
be turned into a positive, team-building process by simply inviting all members to participate.

Conclusion
Implementing experience-centric management will lead to positive impacts to the company
employees and their productivity, as well as improved revenues. Without intentional efforts to imbed
design thinking into a company’s culture in all departments, the transition will not be effective.

3
 Agile
Agile is a flexible, collaborative management style that is people-focused and helpful in solving
“wicked,” or complex problems. It varies from traditional management styles in that it “prioritizes quick
delivery, adapting to change, and collaboration rather than top-down management and following a set
plan” (Coursera, 2021, para. 1). This collaborative management style utilizes the design thinking process
(empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test) to increase flexibility, creativity, and responsiveness in the
workplace.

A key component of Agile methodology is breaking up tasks into smaller projects to facilitate
greater and constant revision, and a faster implementation time. Some of the methods used to
accomplish this include kanban, scrum, the adaptive project framework, and extreme project
management. Kanban is a visual way of approaching and tracking progress of projects. Team members
collaborate using physical representations of work, including post-it notes, whiteboards, or the online
equivalents of these tools. Scrum methodology includes working in a small team of 3-9 members,

4
 led by a scrum master. Work is done in short “sprints” where a team works on a specific project for
just a couple of weeks, and meets briefly everyday in “stand up meetings” to go over progress. An
adaptive project framework changes the traditional forms of management where a project is worked
on consistently in a waterfall approach, to instead work on projects in small parts, and evaluate
effectiveness and progress at each step. Lastly, extreme project management is the idea that a project
can evolve throughout development and change rapidly, in order to best incorporate the needs of
users, employees, the company, etc (Wrike, n.d).
Following these Agile methods promotes a more experience-centric organization because, as is
shown in the agile manifesto, there is a greater emphasis on putting people over processes, software
over documentation, collaboration over negotiation, and flexibility over rigidity (Beedle et al., 2001).
Employees are given more freedom to accomplish work in the way that fits best with their project,
without needing constant supervision from upper management. There is also greater attention to the
customer experience, because the project has room to evolve in order to incorporate newly found
customer needs and desires.

Specific Recommendations for Grifols

- Beginning with upper level management, slowly implement projects that use Agile
frameworks
- Share success stories within the company channels so the concepts become familiar
and success is visible
- In order to manage implementation tension, utilize time in stand up meetings to air
grievances and implement feedback
- Form a team of people from each major department in the company to be an “Agile
test group”
- Host an Agile “how-to” camp for employees that lets them learn about agile
methods in a fun, engaging way
- Incorporate weekly team building exercises into meetings that bring people of
different departments together
- Highlight Agile successes in a weekly company newsletter
- Discuss other companies that have successfully implemented Agile and present
them as a case study to the company. Brainstorm ways to apply it to Grifols.

5
 HX/EX
“Employee experience encapsulates what people encounter and observe over the course of their
tenure at an organization” (Lee, S, 2022, p. 1). This includes every touchpoint from the hiring process to
leaving the company. This should matter to organizations because employees are increasingly valuing
their work-life balance over simple monetary compensation. Qualtrics, one of the leaders of EX in the
business world, explains it this way: “From the moment someone looks at your job opening, to the
moment they leave your company, everything that the worker learns, does, sees, and feels contributes
to their employee experience… Ultimately, it is their experiences – positive and negative – that will
impact how hard they work, how much they collaborate, or whether they are invested in improving
operational performance” (Qualtrics, 2022, para. 1). Every interaction and every touchpoint throughout
an employee’s journey contributes to their overall employee experience.
Jacob Morgan, author of The Employee Experience Advantage, says that “in a world where
money is no longer the primary motivating factor for employees, focusing on the employee experience
is the most promising competitive advantage that organizations can create” (Morgan, 2020). Benefits
that come from focusing on employees’ experience are attracting and retaining talent, enabling work
support, improving engagement, fostering collaboration, inspiring creativity, feeding the bottom line,
bolstering company image, and growing professionally (Schwartz, 2022).
As with any organizational change, making the shift from HR centric to EX transformed comes
with layers of difficulty. To effectively shift from HR to EX the change of culture needs to start with
the top management, then slowly transform each area of the company. HX Transforma’s “Employee
Experience 2020 Global Report & Case Studies” discusses some ways to shift from HR Centric to EX
Transformed: listening to employee stories, analyzing insights, creating employee personas, and journey
mapping employees’ daily lives are a great start (Nelson, 2020). Taking the time to gather empathy data
from employees through interviews, surveys, and personal relationships can provide new and diverse
insights into their daily lives and the unique needs they have.

Specific Recommendations for Grifols

- Identify different employee personas (college-aged students, pre-med students,
working parents, etc)
- Create a recognition program for major milestones along employee journey
- Create employee resource groups for the employees representing minority groups
(LGBTQIA+, women, POC, etc)
- Host company-wide events to encourage strengthening relationships and team-
building in meaningful ways
- Shorten work hours for more flexible schedules
6
 Metrics
The two proposed metrics include a measurement of the customer experiences and a
measurement of employee experience, using the Electronic Muscle Stimulation (EMS) device.
The employee experience is analyzed through utilizing a biophysical feedback measurement
tool to measure the bodily stress level of the employee throughout their shift, by measuring heart
rate and perspiration.. They will attach the EMS device to themselves while they are working in their
different areas: drawing blood, working the front desk, or are packaging and readying the plasma for
delivery. The price of the implementation primarily comes from the price of the EMS device itself,
which is approximately 250$ per device. To start, there would be five devices distributed to a center,
totaling to 1250$ of upfront costs. Grifols will also incentivize wearing the EMS devices by leaving a
small monetary bonus for employees to come and use them while the devices are at their Grifols center.
These devices will find pain points and be used to “assess your progress towards [the company’s] vision
and edges” in the employee experience by measuring and analyzing stress levels and their sources,
which can then be used to test different approaches to the pain points to see if they can be mitigated
(Szóstek, 2020, p. 138).
The customer experience is analyzed through the same method, using the EMS device to
measure the bodily stress of the donor throughout their experience, from when they enter the building
and are checked in, which is when the EMS will be attached to them, to when they donate, and then
when walk out and return the EMS device. Since the EMS devices will be purchased at the employee
experience testing phase, the EMS devices will be reused for the to measure customer experiences,
so the only price implementation is the added bonus given to the donor for being willing to use the
EMS device during their donation time. These devices will assist in finding pain points throughout the
customer experience, and also will determine if changes in the employee experience has a trickle down
improvement to the customer experience as well. This will provide a “multifaceted perspective before
making [the] final decision” which is crucial to designing the best possible solution (Szóstek, 2020,
p.126).

7
Conclusion

8
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