How the National Fund’s Centering Workers in Job Design initiative is helping employers create good jobs and better workplaces

What do a major regional health system operating in Connecticut and New York, and a family-owned restaurant outside of Cleveland, Ohio have in common? At first glance, it may seem like very little as these organizations certainly face very different challenges and opportunities. But the answer is simple: they are both employers that care about transforming their workplaces to help give their workers the best shot at career success.

On March 26, the National Fund hosted Transforming Workplaces and Career Journeys Through Human Centered Design, a virtual symposium where we featured Nuvance Health, a regional health system in Western Connecticut and New York’s Hudson Valley, and Pondi’s, a family-owned restaurant in Lisbon, Ohio discussing their experience with utilizing human-centered design approaches and lessons learned so far as part of the National Fund’s Centering Workers in Job Design initiative. The employer panelists were joined by our Network Partners — Workforce Solutions Collaborative of Metro Hartford and The Fund for Our Economic Future in Northeast Ohio — who are leading the initiative in their respective regions.

Human-centered design or “HCD,” is a problem-solving approach rooted in empathy, rationality, and creativity. HCD is anchored on the principle that people who are closest to a problem have unique, indispensable insights in how to solve it. In the workforce, this means it is anchored in the importance of worker voice.

The National Fund and our Network Partners continue to grow our expertise in utilizing HCD, having led multiple initiatives over the last few years utilizing the approach to improve job quality, career navigation, and workforce systems. Centering Workers in Job Design is our first initiative that aims to bring these separate threads together while engaging employers and frontline workers in the process.

While the companies are each on an HCD journey, there are certainly differences in how they are applying the principles — and we can glean useful insight from both approaches. Nuvance is conducting stakeholder interviews to assess opportunities for improving their career development programs. With the help of coach Anne-Claire Broughton of Broughton Consulting and the Great Game of Business, Pondi’s has implemented open-book management, a transparent approach to finance and operations that has many human-centered elements.

During the symposium, each company and our Network Partners shared the major insights and lessons learn so far.

Here are some highlights:

Human-Centered Design is about sharing power — and responsibility. 

Both organizations understand the give and take that comes from HCD work. When applying practices that allow for entry and mid-level staff to have input, some problem-solving power and responsibility transfers to those employees. But this can also reduce the burdens on senior executives, who don’t have to feel like every challenge requires their attention.

“What I’ve learned from this HCD process so far, is that the sharing of responsibility — especially at the executive level — helps to lower their stress levels and help them focus on what really needs their attention,” said Marcus Paca, Director of Workforce & Career Development at Nuvance. “The mid-level supervisors and directors under them (also) have a tool that they can actively utilize to help solve some of those problems alongside frontline staff.”

Similarly, Jessica Borza, who owns Pondi’s with her husband Matt, noted the early success of implementing open-book practices due to the company’s improved performance and shared responsibility for improvement among the entire team.

“It’s been a true game-changer for us,” she said. “We’re definitely sleeping better at night.”

The people in the room matter.

Repeatedly, experience has shown that only hearing from the people at the top leaves huge blind spots in identifying workplace needs. Whether it’s a design team or a staff huddle, a diverse group of voices are necessary to produce lasting, effective solutions. This ranges from supervisory level to tenured staff, to countless other demographic combinations you can imagine. The more diverse the group in a room is, the more thorough it can be when identifying key challenges that hold an organization back from progress.

Leah Fuhs, Manager of Workforce Solutions at Workforce Solutions Collaborative of Metro Hartford, described their process for engaging team members at every level.

“We started at the top, and we asked permission of leaders to engage with their teams,” she said. “Then we met with their teams and asked permission and kind of cascaded that down, and it feels right. It feels good. You get the leaders buy-in, and then the buzz starts happening within the organization.”

Bishara Addison, Director of Workforce Innovation at the Fund for Our Economic Future, observed that engaging the right people can also include critical industries.

“In the Cleveland area, we have three major sports teams, so tourism and hospitality is a major industry in our region,” she said. “We commissioned a report that showed that if we think about hospitality, broadly defined, it’s about a third of the local economy. That means, if hospitality isn’t working, it’s going to be difficult for any part of our economy to thrive.”

This drew her attention to open book management as a workforce solution that could work particularly well in hospitality.

The outcomes can be significant for both employers and workers.

As a pilot site in the initiative, Pondi’s began to implement open book management in late 2023 and saw fast results — going from a negative $25,000 projected profit to positive $11,000. Empowered by the process, their team then blew those numbers away in 2024, turning in over $280,000 in net profit margin while setting a revenue record. This allowed the company to retire a large amount of debt incurred from a recent expansion — as well as paying the staff nearly $78,000 in aggregate bonuses, their highest possible bonus level.

Broughton shared a story about how Pondi’s announced the bonuses in a way that underlined the HCD principles:

“The wonderful thing that Jessica did when presenting the bonus to everybody in January was to list out two slides worth of ideas that the team had generated throughout the year in order to hit these results,” Broughton said. “I think not only did they do a good job of implementing, but they did a good job of communicating and connecting the dots about how the whole team contributed. Often these bonuses can pay people an additional 10 to 20% of payroll so they make 10 to 20% more than they would otherwise. And that’s pretty rare, I think, in hospitality.”

The journey continues.

The Centering Workers in Job Design initiative is still in progress, but these early insights highlight strong results so far for the participating employers and communities, while also demonstrating that successful workforce development initiatives are equally about change management. Paca summed up the impact of HCD within his own team:

“One of the ways that I’ve taken this HCD process to heart is by trusting my team more with projects and initiatives, giving them more leeway to strategically lead impactful programs,” he said. “It not only spreads out the responsibility, but it begets a higher sense of engagement and loyalty because folks start to feel like they’re really being included in the decision-making process that we have an inclusive environment.”