A Digital Product as a Corporate Culture Asset
I like to think that, to be able to ensure that an in-company digital product is accepted by its user community, we should gift it these 3 qualities:
- A function aimed at building real value within the company (assigning it a clear fundamental purpose).
- A strong personality and temper with a special ability to connect emotionally.
- An assisted life, ensuring the product’s growth and development over time.
At Flux IT, I have the responsibility of being the product owner of RunRun, our internal communication tool. In this article, I’ll tell you how we managed to position RunRun as a tool aligned with culture management.
Acceptance and Affection
These two attributes cut across several actions that Flux IT’s culture management embraces as a philosophy: from workplace design and new on-demand perks to our internal communication digital tool, they all seek to get collaborators to emotionally connect with the company’s way of being and doing.
We are fluxer-centered (aka employee-centered). Those of us who manage different aspects of this family get inspiration either from ideas or needs that fluxers express spontaneously or from the feedback obtained each time the company surveys the satisfaction level in terms of corporate climate. These settings are our inspiration platform. And then comes the part we enjoy the most at Flux IT: figuring out, from all possibilities, which one would be the easiest, catchiest and most useful way to meet those needs.
Broadening the Borders of a Product on the Go
In 2013, I attended a training course taught by d·school( the Institute of Design at Stanford University) in which, at the end of the experience, they showed us a video of an interview to Catherine Courage, by then head of Customer Experience at Citrix, a company aimed at the creation of smart workplaces.
She had been in charge of reshaping the corporate strategy, promoting a work culture driven by the design thinking mindset. She said that to achieve it, she decided to boost internal projects with an impact on Citrix’s own culture. The key was to start small and nail it: that’s how she would prove the equation worked.
At Flux IT, we walked through a similar path and, since then, each time the company pinpoints wicked problems regarding culture or internal processes, Experience Design fluxers embark on super agile research to get the insights that inspire the company to move towards the next level.
2019 was the moment to address weaknesses from the last internal corporate climate survey: on the one hand, there was a lack of clarity perceived in cross processes (like leave requests and travel expenses management) and on the other hand, there was a need for clearer support as regards career development. Our service designers carried out a flawless research work to discover the reasons behind those pain points. They issued a problem statement and a set of guidelines to solve it.
That service design report was a turning point for RunRun: the designers in charge, together with our business analytics mission owner, suggested that RunRun could be the core platform from which we could develop clever solutions on process management and career development.
It was a risky move, since we were about to transgress the product’s original purpose: being a digital playground to inform and integrate fluxers. However, we all detected that, after 6 years of life, it was the right moment to lead an ambitious shift in its approach, one aimed at widening RunRun’s value delivery, seeing it as a tool aligned with culture management.
After going past reflections and reaching agreements, I started redefining the product’s scope, making a commitment to ensure a growth able to meet new demands, both the tangible ones and the ones that may come up under the same value scheme in the future.
A Star Is (Re)Born
The product’s ownership was shared and lead by fluxers with two very different roles: we, the ones in charge of communication and processes had a super coordinated job when it came to stating the business needs. A multidisciplinary and dedicated Internal Solutions team was trusted with the development of the product’s enlarged version. Here, I’ll retrieve the hits that made the 4.0 version of our culture tool happen:
1. Product Personality Booklet
Knowing that this was going to be something big and that product voice would be more relevant than ever before, we carried out sessions to define the creature and drew up a reference document that sums up RunRun’s personality and life background. Now we know that it works within the department that strives for employees’ positive experiences, that it knows it is a digital entity (although it secretly longs to be a person), that it was programmed to be 25 years old, that it is friendly, sassy and it has a sense of humor inspired by fluxers who influence our culture, that it hates Facebook, loves Netflix and many other things.
Why was it useful to perform these product personality activities? To agree on (and document) the perspective from which the product was expected to build a relationship with collaborators. We outlined a strategy that links the tool’s intangible features to its way of conveying messages, expressing reactions and fostering fun exchanges that contribute to the interaction with its audience.
We deliberately exploited product differentiation by setting singular personality codes as regards language use. Since the product’s set of features and the psychological setting is so particular, the personality booklet will help not only write witty and consistent system messages but also imagine and tell hundreds of stories about it.
This agreement enabled us all to stay in sync when it came to spotting the things our system would do and the ones it would never do (or say). That’s how we knew, for instance, that if leave request management had to take place in RunRun, it would never adopt the shape or voice of a boring, complex or red-tape mechanism. We could even imagine what story to tell if, one day, the product gets an audible voice to interact with fluxers. The possibilities are endless!
2. Side Navigation Menu
Redesigning the product’s navigation not only ensured better access to the features universe but it also revealed, through design information, that RunRun wasn’t just a communication tool. Side navigation also entailed guaranteeing the product a scaled future growth.
3. RunRun Leave Requests: Chatbot & Dashboards
A LIT debut and an emancipated personality: the first conversational interface within Flux IT, where fluxers ask for their holiday, study, birthday, paternity or maternity leave, among many other things. It’s a funny transactional chatbot and its way of chatting (the product’s voice) is one of the resources to go through a fun process, that even instructs collaborators on the rules that determine a good process tracking.
The ecosystem of components surrounding leave requests is combined with management dashboards for leader fluxers and data visualization for collaborators, these are modules whose purpose is to ensure absolute information transparency and the permanent display of information about ourselves (read this article by Nicolás Rodriguez, our top UX designer, to zoom in on this matter).
4. RunRun Fluxer Goals Tracker & Leader Goals Dashboard
It’s a new RunRun module focused on simplifying leaders’ management as regards supporting the collaborators’ career development. When conceiving the proposal, we took the criteria to create SMART goals as a reference, and the information availability and design of satellite components were inspired by a UX research carried out especially for this mission.
As with the leave requests dashboard, the purpose of the goals module is to ensure clarity and accessibility to personal information, while also fostering interest in goal achievement, seeing progress highlights that are presented as milestones to fluxers on their path within the company.
5. Product Launch and Assistance
Every UX, product and service designer, as well as subject experts and followers, will know that adding value to a product and positioning it is not just assigning it a bunch of features that are launched once in a while to keep it alive. Addressing the launch is just as important, and each communication move is just another excuse to display the value proposition behind the product.
Thus, all leader fluxers were trained and given documentation on the functionalities that encompassed management tasks, while collaborators were surprised by RunRun itself, which, through fun videos, showed the value of its new features.
Things that Worked for Us
Below, I list a bunch of aspects that helped turn all this work into organizational value, and they have a lot to do with the way of working and conceiving the whole team:
- Staged workflow: each portion of the product that was launched through the year was a chance to conceive its scaled development as modular capsules, setting releases on the backlog from where we could perform the design thinking framework along the backlog’s main requirements, paying attention to specific challenges to focus on: several instances of research, other instances of definitions and agreements, many of them regarding testing, design and development, all linked to agile ceremonies.
- UI comps style guide, design elements + personality guidelines: although RunRun had a permanent team, nothing lasts forever and the product must provide the future teams that will take its ownership and development all necessary documentation to keep growing in an agile and consistent way. That’s why we not only worked on documenting personality criteria but we also made RunRun’s UI comps and design elements available to ease the work of visual designers, UI devs and developers.
- Attention, scope and impact: the product’s new responsibilities were placed at the service of covering the needs that arose from collaborators themselves regarding management and culture. Since RunRun had an impact on 100% of the fluxer population, it is useful to promote full-scale transformations.
- Integration to the internal tools ecosystem: our golden developers’ complete dedication enabled the dialogue between RunRun and other management tools, to ensure cross-channel data display and integration.
- The UX + UXW duet: research was one of the key phases to inspire later solution development. It defied preexistent processes through conversations, discussions and agreements. The users’ predisposition and UX sensitivity, as well as our UX writer’s work, were key to bridge the gap between the product’s personality guidelines and the creation of the tool’s interactions, messages and dialogues.
- Information design as a VD guiding principle: product launches linked to management had to be super functional. That’s why, the look & feel adopted the product’s original UI development principles, and it demanded a thorough visual design work driven by information design when setting hierarchies and developing screen layouts.
- Product-oriented team: in each kick-off, daily, demo and retro meeting, whenever it was necessary, we took care of ensuring conversations about the macro strategy to empower the team’s players when it was time to work. As regards the work process, we achieved a constant flow of suggestions, warnings and ideas with a systematic view from our team, even if that wasn’t part of their core responsibilities: a clear “I DO CARE” ATTITUDE. We were all crazy about making sure that each launch was consistent with the value proposition we had to promote.
RunRun’s 2019 launches were very well received by collaborators. Today, 100% of the fluxers interacted at least once with RunRun Chatbot and leave requests transactions increased by 19% compared to the tool that what used before this launch, decreasing fluxers’ time spent on this process by 65%. Moreover, RunRun Goals was launched in January and the process is still in progress, recording 41% of fluxers with active career goals.
By channeling the company’s core goals within the tool and merging them with particular design, interaction and communication styles, we managed to heighten distinctive cultural traits, broaden impact and, in short, we helped RunRun play in the administration and culture management big leagues.
Do you work in employee experience? I want to hear about your work! Look for me somewhere and let’s make contact! ツ
