Onboarding and Retention – From Hire to Retire

Problem Statement

“How might we improve our employee on-boarding to increase retention rate.”
– CEO of Fortune 10 Health Company

My role

Working as part of a large multi disciplinary team, my role was to lead the user experience research and design to solve for a 20 year old issue around employee on-boarding and retention. We started with research and the design thinking process in a collaborative environment with managers, Employee Relations, Human Resources, Change Management, Communications, Security, Compliance, Legal, Development, Product and Analytics.

The process:

Gather requirements

Initial project plan

Research

Competitive analysis and user interviews

Personas

Define pain points, goals and metrics

Journey Maps

Journey maps

Ideation

White boarding out ideas with the team

Wireframes

Provide sketch wireframes

Clickable prototype

Use prototype for usability testing

Usability Test and Iterate

Work with development to deliver end product to stakeholders.

The requirements

Business: Managers are struggling with a multitude of responsibilities. Leading teams, communicating with the business, mentoring, coaching and many admin tasks of on-boarding and managing a team. How might we improve and automate tasks to allow more time for 1on1 coaching, mentoring and communicating with the business.

User: Have easy access to all their benefits in one place such as paychecks, PTO, health plans and more.

Technology: Working with current systems with minimal cost/effort to improve the process flows and confusion.

Discovery phase – research

We started with virtual 1on1 interviews with 30 essential employees at Distribution Centers across the US, Canada and UK. The supervisors at the DC set up the video call in a conference room where the employees would come in at their scheduled time and talk with us on the video screen for about 30 minutes each.

Front End User interviews

The majority of workers at the DC are un-wired, meaning no email or outside communication to their work environment.

Current communications are done inside the workplace through morning meetings and announcements from managers and supervisors.

Managers and Supervisors do have access to company emails and communications.

Majority of workers had no objections to using their personal devices to receive company communications or download an company app.

Defining user personas

Persona’s were created for the essential workers as wired and un-wired employees. We broke the unwired population into material handlers, drivers, cross doc drivers. Wired employees were anyone with a company email including supervisors, managers, contributors and executives. We address their roles, technical expertise, available communications, frustrations and community etc.

User Journey Map

We learned about their fast paced, time sensitive work days and mapped their journey capturing their emotions, frustrations and possible opportunities to make it better and easier.

Key Pain Points

Feedback from both essentials workers and mangers/supervisors

Login Credentials

Remembering thier login credentials and password resets every 120 days

Limited Time

DC workers are evaluated by the time it takes to get certain items completed. They are always watching the clock and so there is no time during their shifts to deal with other issues.

Limited Resources

When they have questions they have to go to their supervisors or call HR as those resources are no longer on site and closed for half the population during nightshifts.

Insights and Opportunities

Distribution employees feel their communications at work are enough. They did not seem to have a great need for more or too much interest in corporate communications. From the interviews we were able to learn about what was important to them and could be make their lives better and easier.

All Apps in One Place

Simple Microsoft Forms to meet compliance quickly, with minimal effort and speed up the manual paper process.

Empower Them After Hours

Empower employees with the resources after hours when they have the time to deal with issues and questions.

Daily Engagement Opportunities

Include Daily Screening, Labor Management numbers and Safety Bingo Contests to name just a few.

Virtual Ideation Workshops

Reviewed the end users with the stakeholders and worked together in Miro to brainstorm ideas to meet the user needs and the business needs in the technical constraints we were working with.

User Flows

Collaborated with development, human resources, technical support and employee relations teams to create the process flows solution for the essential employees in the app.

Lo Fidelity Wireframes

We created wireframes to experiment with different layouts and flows for the content.

Working with Salesforce as the technology, we had limitations on what was possible.

See close up of the lo fidelity wireframes

Mockups

The mobile app would aim for:

1. Aall apps in one place
2. Ask HR a question anytime
3. View articles about the company
4. Leave feedback in the app
5. Password expiration notifications
6. Communicate with your distribution center

Developer Annotations

Document the interactions, dimensions and any details that may be helpful to the developers that are not included in the style guides.

Include user stories for the features in an Excel sheet with a glossary of terms to reference.

Usability Testing

Due to Covid-19 the usability tests were conducted via individual Webex Video calls. The user verbally walked us through the tasks they were asked to perform as we watched them interact with the current solutions.

Collaborate with IA on API integration

Work with Architects to understand which apps have APIs that can be used to pull in the relevant information into the MyConnect application to avoid having multiple logins.

Collaborate with Global Identity and Security

See where Single Sign On can be used and integrated across platforms. Look into facial recognition and fingerprint options to also lower sign on attempts.

Collaborate with Developers

See what is possible in the Salesforce platform and requires minimal code and upkeep.

Prototype and test new features

Pay statements is the number one asked for app and are able to use an API to pull the relevant information into the application and avoid having to login.

We created a low fidelity prototype to test the new feature and get users feedback.

6 employees are scheduled to participate in a usability test on the prototype.

Continue to test and iterate

We continue to have pilot feedback sessions every two weeks from the super user population.

We will continue to test each iteration and get that feedback to make the app more successful.

– Looking at LM numbers
– Targeted content
– Contests and Events
– Request PTO

Run System Usability Survey

We sent out a SUS Survey after a month of the pilot launch to get a starting point to measure the apps usability.

We will continue to send these out quarterly to measure the progress.

Launch to all DC’s
April 1, 2021.

Testimonial

Startup work is not for the weak. Either you thrive under stress and own it, or you crumble under pressure. I have been fortunate to have worked with Jenniffer on lots of projects and count on her as a valuable team member. Jenniffer is an exceptional designer, with experience working with many types of applications and my first choice when it comes to any collaboration. Her extensive background in UI/UX made delivering projects a breeze. To only talk about her skills as a UI designer is a disservice to her and what she brings to the team. Since I started working alongside her, she has taken many roles within the organization. Jenniffer is as comfortable pushing out mock-ups as she is running a tech team. I have worked alongside her and under her leadership and always look forward to the next time our paths cross.

Alex Oatridge, Director of Engineering at MiTú Network