The COVID-19 pandemic changed the way we both live and work. As companies became more distributed, employee schedules became more complicated and wellbeing was significantly impacted. Top employee problems included social isolation, lack of control over one’s schedule, and difficulty separating work from life. I currently lead a team at large tech company that aims to alleviate those issues through technology.
In a 2021 annual survey
Less than 60% of employees agreed with the statement “I am satisfied with my emotional wellbeing.”
After conducting research and rapid prototyping, my team launched two products that help employees express and enforce their working preferences. Both products were so well received, they were mentioned by our CEO in a company-wide meeting.
I co-founded a team to tackle the following question:
How might we empower employees to prioritize their wellbeing through more control and awareness of work/life balance?
I partnered with product management and engineering co-leads to define an ambiguous, open-ended problem space into an actionable product roadmap for our newly formed team.
Research
I started by looking at existing research in the wellbeing space, both internal and external. However there was a gap when it came to the specific challenges employees face with wellbeing, so I partnered with a UX researcher to conduct internal research. We identified these top challenges to employee wellbeing:
Too many meetings while working remotely
Inability to focus, or too many interruptions
Difficulty creating boundaries to detach from work
Using the research findings, I brainstormed and designed more than 10 UX-driven experiment ideas. I created lightweight surveys where user rated the concepts based on criteria like “helpfulness” to see what concepts resonated with users.
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Do not disturb
Contextual and actionable prompts to let users know when someone is in ‘Do Not Disturb’ mode.
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Meeting dashboard
An actionable dashboard that shows your meeting activity and suggestions to lighten your meeting load.
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Outside working hours
Prompt the user when they’re about to schedule a meeting with someone outside their working hours.
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User Manual
A structured for users to communicate their collaboration preferences.
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Audio-only meetings
Users can choose to have audio-only meetings to decrease video conferencing fatigue.
Driving prototype to product
We decided to invest in User Manuals - a concept to help employees express their collaboration preferences in a structured way. I collaborated with a UX engineer to iteratively build a prototype in less than 4 weeks.
Partnering with a UX researcher, I helped construct a research plan for how we would validate the prototype. Our researcher then conducted user interviews to collect specific feedback, which I translated into changes to the design.
After refining the prototype, we shared the tool more widely to see if there would be organic adoption. Within a month we had 3,000 profiles created, with 82% of users agreeing the tool “allows employees to better create boundaries and detach from work”.
After validating the prototype, I pitched to double the size of the team and build a scalable version of the product. 6 months later, we launched a production version of the tool company-wide.
A wellbeing ecosystem
But it’s not enough to capture collaboration preferences - we need to show them in our tools for them to be fully respected. So we also built and launched a partner chrome extension to show those preferences inline in our tools. For example, if an employee prefers 5 minute breaks between meetings, we’ll let their coworkers know when they are scheduling a meeting with them.
After launch, we saw 300% growth in the number of User Manuals and a similar number of downloads for the chrome extension. We also saw positive trends in the user behavioral metrics we were tracking, such as the number of chat messages abandoned after seeing a user’s preferences. Both products were so well received, they were mentioned by our CEO in a company-wide meeting.
Because this project is internal, reach out to me for more details.