Cisco MyWorkLife

MyWorkLife is a dashboard designed to improve the quality of life of Cisco employees by addressing employee retention in the current state of the global workforce, including combating ‘hustle culture’ and the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Overview

As the capstone project of the Braven Career Accelerator course at San Jose State, Cisco presented the competing teams with the following challenge:

Given the significant impact on women and people of color due to the pandemic, how can Cisco retain its diverse talent, as we prepare for the future evolution of the work environment?

In this challenge, we are asked to design a solution which addresses Cisco’s concern for employee retention during COVID-19 within highly-affected demographics, such as women and people of color. What groundbreaking initiative could our team pitch to Cisco that would enable them to support this demographic and improve employee retention?

Users and Audience

To learn more about our users and audience, the research arm of the team attended Cisco’s open panels and interviewed 10+ current Cisco employees. While obviously important to reach all members of Cisco’s workforce with our designs, the Cisco panels and publicly available statistics research we encountered influenced our decision to focus on a specific audience to design around: working-from-home mothers.

--illustration: broad to narrow research filter--

Roles and Responsibilities

As the lead prototyper, I would be involved in the design of the product from start to finish. While I did most of my heavy lifting during the prototyping phase of the challenge, I wanted to participate in the research and testing phases as well to keep my perspective fresh. My contributions to the project included:

• Preliminary user research and recruitment.

• Data synthesis from Cisco panels and interviews.

• Brainstorming for design.

• Prototype building and user testing.

• Prototype presentation to Cisco judges.

Scope and Constraints

Our project development time frame was 6 weeks, broken into sections:

1. Empathize

2. Synthesize

3. Ideate

4. Prototype

5. Test & Refine

6. Rehearse & Present

Our biggest constraints included lack of coordination and effort from certain team members, and only 7 minutes of final presentation time. Our project addressed a variety of issues and included a number of interesting features, but we had limited time to explain everything to the Cisco stakeholders.

The Process

We brainstormed the following problem statement:

Working mothers are facing burnout and leaving the workforce because the cultural trend is to push yourself career-wise and not show weakness. This leads to a blurred line between work and life balance and an unwillingness to ask for help.

Our research team attended 3 Cisco panels and interviewed several Cisco employees of varying demographics.

--illustrate with questionnaire and findings--

We identified trends in the interview data, leading to the team-wide brainstorm decision to consciously design with a specific demographic in mind: working-from-home mothers. This demographic seemed most susceptible to an issue we labeled ‘hustle culture’ and as a result, seemed to be experiencing burnout at a higher rate than other demographics.

--illustrate hustle culture--

Now that we synthesized problem areas from trends in our data set, we brainstormed how Cisco could best help our primary user persona, ‘Mary’.

--illustrate ‘Mary’--

Since the panels we attended all seemed to be singing Cisco’s praises for their efforts in improving employee satisfaction and work-life balance, we decided the issue was not due to a lack of effort on Cisco’s part. This led our brainstorming session down the path of taking a more direct approach to fighting ‘hustle culture’ - we wanted to bring Cisco’s self-care initiatives and messaging directly to employees efficiently and easily.

As someone previously working at a big company and feeling both overwhelmed and annoyed by their employee resources portal, this design concept had personal value to me.

Outcomes and lessons.

--illustrate prototype development and features--

I built our dashboard prototype in Figma and shared it with the team for testing and feedback. Key features included:

• Personalized recommendation and prioritizing of Cisco benefits and programs, intended to save employee time and effort

• Anonymous request system to empower employees to bring issues to the attention of team leads without feeling vulnerable

• Visual tracking of self-care, such as emotional check-in graph, time since days off, etc.

• Bringing anti-hustle culture messaging to the forefront through leadership bulletins, weekly team goals for employee self-care, and more

• Multi-layer calendar to filter for relevant workshops and events while keeping key deadlines

• Visual design intended to minimize stress and hostility, such as calming color scheme and avoidance of conventional harsh graphic design elements associated with scheduling and productivity software

Time constraints limited our reiteration cycles, but we successfully presented our proposal to Cisco and earned an excellent score.

Lessons and reflections:

• You get back what you put in - the project felt strongest when the whole team was putting in high effort, weakest when the team wasn’t communicating or committing.

• Reiteration is invaluable - design would have felt 10x better with more time to reiterate or redesign based on feedback

• Time management in the workplace is an unsolved issue and something I find myself thinking about a lot. Everything is competing for time and attention and we just don’t have that much of it (especially not at high output levels of work). This will hopefully one day be a design thinking specialty area where I can sell myself as an expert.