While nutrition is one of the factors that can support a patient's recovery, in post-Soviet hospitals, it's more of a bad joke. That’s why I was surprised when news started spreading from the small Czech town of Nymburk that the local hospital cafeteria started serving salmon, bun bo nam bo, or Jerusalem artichoke soup. Despite having to meet the same nutritional and financial constraints as any other facility, their kitchen managed to significantly improve the food service and the overall experience for both patients and staff. So I looked into what they did differently.
Food as a systemic symptom
In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced restaurants to shut down, Nikolas Kratěna's new restaurant was no exception. A cook who had previously worked at the chain Ambiente and the Hilton hotel, decided to bridge the difficult period by taking a job in a hospital kitchen. But the environment he encountered was completely different from the commercial kitchens he knew. The hospital kitchen relied heavily on pre-made and instant ingredients, accepted near-expired supplies from vendors, lacked standard procedures, and everyone did things their own way, regardless of outcomes.
The unappetizing food was just a symptom of broader systemic issues – the kind you’ll find in most organizations, even commercial ones. On the surface, things might look like they’re working. The brand delivers a product or service, but a great deal of value is being lost. Focused performance eludes because employees waste energy on inefficient tasks, and innovation stalls due to lack of motivation or support for experimentation. Ironically, productivity and creativity as essentials for long-term success are what every company expects from its workforce. Yet few know how to measure and consciously improve these factors.
From chef to system designer
Kratěna initially tried to teach restaurant techniques to his colleagues, but they resisted. His talent and the growing tensions were noticed by the head of HR, who, together with the hospital director, offered him ownership of the kitchen operations. That sparked – albeit unintentionally – what turned out to be a textbook example of how employee experience can be transformed.
Employee experience (EX) is a holistic approach to talent management that considers everything an employee encounters throughout their time in an organization. It isn’t about massages, darts, or a fridge full of beer in the corporate kitchen. It’s about the conditions that directly impact an employee’s performance. Whether the workflows they follow are optimal, whether they have the right tools for the job, and ultimately, whether their work creates value for the end customer and contributes to the viability of the company.
EX can be purposefully designed, just like customer experience – by shaping the environment, tools, and interactions that support employees in prospering in their work. Designing employee experience means consciously crafting all touchpoints to support performance and engagement. Only when employees have their needs met (tools, procedures, training, recognition, collaboration, meaning) can they create value for customers and, by extension, for the business. While Kratěna isn’t a designer, his intuitive approach after taking over the kitchen closely followed design principles.
How to design employee productivity
When something’s not working, workers usually feel it – it drains them, slows them down, or complicates their performance. But articulating the problem in a way that colleagues or superiors understand and are willing to help solve is a different challenge. Here are a few tips to identify and address problem areas, no matter whether you’re in a managerial or operational role.
1. Create an employee service blueprint
Start by mapping the employee journey, similar to how you’d map the customer journey. Go beyond the basic phases of recruitment, onboarding, development, and exit. Instead, detail the actual workflow or create a service diagram of how employees interact with customers. This helps reveal blind spots where productivity drops, costs rise, or errors occur.
Download our service diagram template and map out what your employees experience during their workday: what tools they use, where they encounter obstacles, and where energy or motivation is lost. This is exactly what Kratěna did – he analyzed the current state of the kitchen and identified where skills, structure, and human potential were lacking.
2. Look for frustration points
Focus on why things are happening. Instead of asking “Are you satisfied?” try to find out which tasks are unnecessarily difficult or confusing – and why. You can also observe your colleagues at work, but make it clear you’re not evaluating their performance. You’re there to understand obstacles and unmet needs, so you can design better tools, processes and channels they use.
Kratěna had the advantage of firsthand experience in the kitchen. He knew where the pain points were, and his commercial background helped him implement quick fixes. He changed suppliers, hired professional cooks, and introduced simple but nutritionally balanced recipes.
3. Ask for feedback from colleagues
To ensure your changes will actually improve things, ask for feedback. It proved eye-opening for Kratěna as well. Encouraged by early wins, he rolled out the new menu across the entire hospital – only to be told by nurses from long-term care that elderly patients weren’t eating his modern dishes and had to be served nutritional supplements for three days.
That’s when he realized the kitchen needed partners like nutritional therapists to perform well. He also trained the staff at individual hospital departments in proper food service techniques, so patients could fully enjoy the dining experience. That’s how good employee experience spills over into customer experience.
4. Loosen decision-making constraints
Identify where employees need more freedom, resources, or information to make good decisions. This works both ways. Top-down, like when the hospital leadership put their trust in a motivated and capable chef, and bottom-up, when Kratěna advocated for increased investment in ingredients and staff.
In Nymburk, food began to be seen as part of patient care. Today, the hospital allocates twice as much budget to meals. The team regularly attends internships in top restaurants, and Kratěna helps his colleagues grow by giving them more competences. He handed over the head chef role to his colleague Mikuláš to help him gain leadership experience, while stepping into a more supportive role himself.
5. Test small changes quickly
Don’t start with big projects, test small tweaks and measure what actually helps. This approach makes process, tool, culture, communication, and leadership changes more acceptable and easier to implement.
Together with dietitians, Kratěna worked department by department, tailoring menus to specific needs. Maternity patients got meals supporting lactation, also diabetics and patients with swallowing difficulties got appropriate diets. He focused on clearly defining expectations and gathering regular feedback, from both colleagues and patients. This created an environment of mutual trust and shared responsibility, prepared to flex with whatever the future brings.
EX as a base for business growth
Today, Kratěna’s hospital kitchen produces meals on par with quality restaurants. The result isn’t just satisfied patients, but new revenue streams as well. The trained staff have improved the operation and menu of the hospital cafeteria, which now enjoys greater attendance, and its good reputation has brought interest in delivery. The hospital sends 50 portions a day to the local nursing service, which has also expressed interest in covering the entire operation, for which the kitchen is not yet dimensioned.
Designing the employee experience has significant potential to scale services and deliver tangible business impact. We saw this in our work with electronics retailer NAY, where improving the sales platform helped unify and boost omnichannel performance. Merging service design with employee experience design is a powerful way to drive successful change:
- Using employees as a limited sample of users enables you to validate concepts and test solutions in a controlled live environment and identify gaps.
- Introducing an internal tool or process first allows the employees to become familiar with the system before it's rolled out to customers.
- Focusing attention on employees sends a positive signal to the organization and helps increase their loyalty and commitment to the employer.
A recipe against stagnation
A design-led approach offers proven methods to intentionally and systematically improve internal processes. Employee experience and better services don’t have to be a matter of luck or gut feeling like in the case of the chef from Nymburk. You can start on your own and experiment with various design tools, such as our Service Blueprint. You’ll get faster results if you bring in experienced experts. Or, take the longest but most sustainable path by building your own in-house team of experience designers who will improve both the customer journey and the experience of their colleagues. You can assess what the best approach is for your company in this short 6-question CX maturity test.
Employee experience is about systematically removing barriers and creating an environment where performance happens because of the system, not despite it. It can also serve as a lever for raising market standards or as an ESG tool. Although Nikolas Kratěna no longer works in a hospital, he’s now being invited to other healthcare facilities because food has become an informal indicator of how well an institution cares for both its patients and its staff. Which part of your internal process could be such a game changer?
