Week 04 - More exploratory research and synthesis
This week, we came up with a research plan to learn more about our stakeholders. For the service workers, we used three different techniques of research:
- Interviews and guided story-telling
- Appreciation letter and break-up letters
- Emotion mapping
Through the interviews, we tried learning about the service workers- their professional backgrounds, their work-days, the challenges that they face at work, their relationships with superiors as well as students, their hopes and dreams etc. By asking these questions, we were trying to understand if there were any pain points that could be addressed through empathy.
We interviewed six service workers on campus-
- Joe- Steamfitter
- Jason- Steamfitter
- Patrick Cauley- Shuttle driver
- Davon Cruse- Server at Hunt Cafe
- Sadeah Peppers- Cook at Schwatz Dining Hall
- Ron- Cleaner (custodial services)
JOE AND JASON — STEAMFITTERS
Lack of Communication
“I wish my job would have a better understanding of my trade.”
“Communication with management is the biggest challenge.”
“Supervisors don’t see the work we do but they say you are doing a good job but we think ‘how do you know that’?”
Job Satisfaction
“I like the variety of work and that this is a stable job.”
Relationship with students
“We work in the background and don’t often communicate with students.”
Community
“Union is like family. They support you and you learn to be the best at your job.”
PATRICK CAULEY — SHUTTLE DRIVER
Job Satisfaction
“I think I have the easiest job in western civilization. I really enjoy the interaction with student and staff.”
I’ve probably never said ‘you’re welcome — have a good day’ more in my life.”
DAVON CRUSE - SERVER AT HUNT CAFE
Job satisfaction
“I have worked here for 4 years. I like to work here. It help me support myself and my family.”
“Less hectic. Not very challenging.”
Interaction with Students
“I am happy to be with them and we talk a lot… I feel like I’m a part of this school.”
Interaction with Manager
“She appreciates me a lot for doing much work, cleaning it, and keeping things well-organized. She is very nice.”
Dissatisfaction with Chartwell
“They laid off full time union employees and was not considering their family and health. I hope they would have considered us as a whole and respect our contract.”
SADEAH PEPPERS — COOK AT SCHWATZ DINING HALL
More work for lesser pay
“I do the job of two people. When I’m not in, two of my managers have to work simultaneously to get my work done.” “I don’t want to be here.”
“I was paid more at my last job at the overnight bakery on campus.”
“Employees have skills, but are not paid well enough to use those skills.”
Over-worked
“I start working before my official working hours otherwise I won’t finish on time.”
Over-qualified
“I have more skills than required for this job.”
Lack of help from co-workers
“ I don’t always get people to help me when I need more hands.”
Positive but short interaction with students
“Students hi-5 me in the hall and say that breakfast was good!”
“I don’t have the time to have conversations with students.”
System biased towards seniors
“Seniors with less abilities are paid more because they’re here since many years.”
Future plans
“I am going to open my food truck soon. I will give the students what they want to eat.” “Management knows about the dissatisfaction of students, but they just don’t care.”
RONALD CONLEY — HUNT LIBRARY CUSTODIAL SERVICE WORKER
Job Satisfaction
“Cleaning does not require specific skills/training and it’s not a difficult job. And it pays quite well.”
Interaction with Students
“Students are so polite. They never offended me.”
“I know they are here for study. So I don’t want to bother them by initiating conversation. But if they reach out to me, I am open to talk with them. There are several students who often greets each other. … It’s not a deep conversation but rather than just saying hi, how are you, and thank you.”
Interaction with Co-workers
“I usually work alone but I and my co-workers help each other whenever we need help. (But there are not many cases for me to need their help.)”
Interaction with Supervisors
“They are not from unions, and they sometimes don’t like us because of that. … But some union workers take advantage of the power of union, which makes gap between supervisors and workers.”
We reached out to some experts this week but got a response from only one. Tammar is an undergraduate at the school of design who has been associated with labor unions in the past. She gave us some helpful insights.
TAMMAR ZEA-WOLFSON — UNDERGRADUATE DESIGN STUDENT
Power dynamic in service
“When you’re providing a service to someone, there is an inherent power dynamic that can play out in a multitude ways
“There’s frustration about work that you see value in but others don’t see value in.”
Need for empathy
“Services workers are frequently threatened basically because they are already, often times working hard in undervalued positions and they’re trying to keep it together financially and to add any disrespect to that is quite insult to injury in some cases.”
Experience as a means for empathy
“People who have served before are naturally more empathetic because they can actually understand the work and it’s really hard to understand the work if you haven’t done it before.”
Bias in systems
“Systems are often geared towards the user and there’s often embedded injustice. What would a worker-centric service design system look like?”
Cognitive empathy
“Sometimes it just boils down to social psychology: people being taught how to empathize and how to look at the situation as contextual, like its the context instead of the individual. That’s a skill that people should be taught.”
“If you’re 18 and if you haven’t been taught to empathize..its not like you’re a bad person, it doesn’t occur to you that the person on the other side of the counter has a complicated life that you can’t even wrap your mind around.
Cause of lack of empathy
And that’s kind of stereotyping the experience of the workers, like people have different lives and different experiences but I think there is something in that age difference and also the economic difference.”
Social connection as a means
“Cause the work they’re doing is critical, like it all works together.. and sometimes communicating that value is important and I guess and making social connections is one way to do that.”
Differences in empathy at workplaces
“Each workplace has its own ecosystem and it just depends on the personalities and the histories, you know what kind of company it is. You know, its like any other job experience.”
Advantages of unions
“I think having a union really helps because there is a mutual understanding of a baseline that the contract does not cover and there are lots of things that are not covered in a contract that are more nuanced and I would speculate that a lot of those things are the pain points.” Eg communication flow both ways.
Emotional labor
“There’s this line between doing your job and the emotional labor part; like how do you offer meaningful connection without creating emotional labor for someone.”
We also interviewed a few students on campus, from different age groups, socio-economic backgrounds, cultures, and ethnicities — our potential ‘empathizers.’
5 Students
3 Male, 2 Female
4 Grad, 1 Undergrad
Religious Backgrounds: Jewish, Catholic, ChristianSocio-Economic Backgrounds: Self-identified Upper Middle, Middle, Working class
Ethnicities: Caucasian, Asian, Black
Here‘s a list of collective insights that we gained from them:
MISSING AUTHENTICITY + LIMITED TIME+ POWER IMBALANCE
“but its superficial..like Hi, how was your day. It’s a fun interaction but that’s it.”
“I don’t know if this is just how the privileged guilty feel”
“Then again, its like they’re doing their job, and you don’t even know if they want to have a conversation.”
“I had a little interaction, but I don’t think it was beyond superficial since they were..y’know..they’re paid to be hospitable”
“..by non-superficial conversation, I mean conversations with substance. So its not often that I have that with a waitor.. His literal job is to just to bring food and leave, just because of social and cultural norms and things like that, so beyond that [the usual questions for service], nothing really happens.”
“When you’re doing a job that is routine, even your interactions are performative, at least that was my experience… But I don’t know what they want.. ”
MISSING ‘UNDERSTANDING’
“I’ve never been in a situation to utilize social welfare, so I don’t know where that fits..”
“We see them every once in a while, so we know he has a family, things like that. But anything more than that, probably not.”
“It was a one-way street… I dunno, where was Bryan from?? Maybe someone else from the staff would know.”
“Single parenthood..I guess I don’t know much about that”
“Apparently he was a contractor here at CMU, and he dropped out of high school..and he came back to CMU and how we don’t treat people who are uneducated well, and how CMU has this bubble, and I definitely understand what he was saying, but I was just tired after a long day, and I was like “Oh, my goodness”, like “I hear you, but..””
[working class background] “..I acquaint talking to rich people like talking to people from a different generation, you know where there’s this gap in perspective because of how you’ve lived or how you’re used to living, and that sort of stuff”
SPARKS OF EMPATHY
“Because like this guy had a part-time job because he wanted to save up to buy registration forms so that he could apply to college.. So I dunno, maybe it was a mix of compassion..”
“My soccer team– half were Caucasian and half Hispanic, some illegal immigrants..there wasn’t much diversity where I lived”
“I was a barista for 6 years of my young adult life, and so I definitely try to make humanizing conversation with them, because I know what it can be like, and so redundant and so boring, that literally interactions with your customers can make or break your day.”
[working class background] “I mean even though they [service staff on the cruise] were all very nice, they were obviously paid to be that way…So, I dunno, its this strange surrealness of acknowledging that they don’t make enough money, but they have to act as they do..”
To make sense of all the information we had collected, we wrote down the highlights of our research and did an affinity clustering exercise to find common themes.
We also did a recap of what empathy means to us and what the lack of it might mean in the context of our chosen topic.
Two potential directions emerged from this exercise that could serve as opportunity areas to develop empathy:
Empathy between Union Trade Workers and (Non-union) Supervisors
- Have heard from union workers that there is little understanding of their craft/poor communication from supervisors
- Chartwell Layoffs show little regard for worker rights
- The article explains that workers have ideas about food but are not listened to
- Union vs Right-to-work law debate across the U.S.
- Teacher union strikes across the US <opportunity to scale
- Increase in union strikes in 2018 <opportunity to scale
Minimum-wage service workers at CMU & College Students
- Inequality is at its worst ever– affecting many social indicators of a healthy society.
- Minimum wage workers face the worst pay and benefits, most job-insecurity and maximum risks from climate and technological changes, and often lack the means to tackle these.
- Students at institutions like CMU represent the global affluent of tomorrow– which have increasing political power, & are decision makers of tomorrow in business, tech, and policy.
Students hold the potential to provide maximum leverage because:
- Best age at which attitude change and belief-formation can occur
- They reside outside the formal bottom-line driven attitudes towards workers
- They experience an ‘invisibility’ of the lived experiences of these people who’re different from them and are likely to be affected by their political and professional lives.
To evaluate both these ideas, we made a list of the pros and cons of both:
We are in the process of discussing the pros and cons of both these directions to decide on the best way to move forward.
