Award-nominated inclusion campaign that led to a 400% rise in colleagues accessing support
We partnered with HSBC UK, RNID and Jam Pan to help colleagues experience hearing loss for themselves, and make it easier to ask for support.
Hear it from the people who built this award-nominated digital experience
Georgie Cooke (Lima Delta) and Louise Bassiri (HSBC UK) join Michelle Parry-Slater on the Learning Uncut podcast to talk about designing for empathy at scale.
An invisible challenge
Around 18 million adults in the UK, one in three, live with hearing loss, tinnitus or deafness. Yet across HSBC UK’s 23,000 colleagues, only 16 had formally disclosed a form of hearing loss.
As part of a two-year partnership with RNID, HSBC UK wanted to change that: to increase disclosures, boost access to support, and empower every colleague to communicate inclusively, with each other and with customers.
One part of the campaign was a digital experience for all colleagues. That’s where we came in.
An experience, rather than just telling people.
Working with HSBC colleagues with lived experience, the Ability UK network and RNID, we built a self-elected digital module around two immersive, first-person video scenarios where the user experiences audio manipulation similar to hearing loss: one in a busy branch, one in an office meeting room.
Both were filmed in real HSBC locations with real HSBC colleagues, and the meeting scenario was directed by a colleague with lived experience of hearing loss.
We manipulated the audio to recreate common experiences of hearing loss, changing how background and foreground noise interact, muffling sound and removing certain pitches. RNID audiologists reviewed every scenario for accuracy.
The learning journey:
Step into the scenario
Learners see and hear a branch or a meeting through simulated hearing loss, in the first person.
Complete a real task
Help a customer or colleague while struggling to hear, so the difficulty of non-inclusive environments is felt, not described.
Learn what helps
Practical, RNID-backed tips for communicating inclusively with colleagues and customers.
Check your own hearing
An RNID hearing check, embedded at the end. Three minutes, private, right in the moment.
A hearing check, in the moment
Rather than signposting to a hearing check, we embedded RNID’s three-minute online check at the end of the module, private and a click away. Nearly half of everyone who completed the learning took it there and then.
It’s clear to me that you were setting learners up to feel, and I know that when anyone has a learning experience and they have an emotional reaction, it sits with them for longer, that’s for sure.
Built on behavioural science
The programme draws on a handful of behavioural science principles:
Experience over information
Don’t tell people they should care. Put them in the situation so they experience it for themselves, and they have no choice but to care.
Real places, real people
Familiar branches, meeting rooms and colleagues made the scenarios instantly relevant. This wasn’t someone else’s problem; it could happen at any desk.
Lived experience, not assumptions
Colleagues with lived experience shaped where the scenarios happen, while RNID’s expertise meant the load didn’t fall on them alone.
Act in the moment
Motivation peaks straight after the experience. Embedding the hearing check there removed the friction between intention and action.
increase in colleagues disclosing hearing loss.
Over 4,000 colleagues completed the voluntary learning, with a completion rate of around 90%. This makes it HSBC’s best-performing voluntary learning that year.
Nearly 2,000 took the hearing check, and around 60% of them showed signs of hearing loss. Some have since been formally diagnosed and fitted with hearing aids, and workplace assessments for hearing loss are up too. The programme was shortlisted for two Learning Technologies Awards.
It’s not only the stats – it’s the life impact that this learning has had for our colleagues across the business, which is really powerful.
That’s something that we’re really proud of and I think is real testament to what we created and how the whole project team worked together collaboratively to really bring this to life.
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