Week 08 - Synthesis and early concepts
In order to make sense of the data that we had collected in our generative workshop, we used different methods like content analysis, 2X2’s and affinity clustering.
For the first activity, we tried to find common themes through content analysis. We created a spreadsheet to record the different affinities and conflicts stated by participants and made a note of the common themes that emerged from multiple participants.
Through this exercise, we confirmed that most conflicts existed between the workers and the management. Surprisingly, a number of affinities also emerged between the management and service workers. For example, both groups wanted business to do well and wanted to make consumers happy.
In order to synthesize the second activity, we used a 2x2 to map the participants’ responses into four distinct categories.
In the above visual, it seems like the workers feel like they do more for their community, but they do not receive much from the community in return. The ‘community’ behaviors of the two groups (consumers and workers) were distinctly different and sometimes complementary. For example, the consumers wished that they could help others more and the workers expressed their interest in receiving help and support for individual growth.
One striking observation from the third activity was that workers and consumers imagined distinct types of futures. Customers picked attributes like happy and harmonious while workers picked attributes like equal and accommodating. An interesting observation was that the ‘Equal’ card was picked multiple times.
These exercises helped us consolidate our insights and opportunities-
When we chose low-income service workers, we were focussed on income disparity. When we talked to people, we found that money was a motivation, but they were more concerned with poor work culture.
We recognized the opportunity that our solution could foster valuable relationships in the workplace. As we all know, healthy relationships are essential to both our happiness both in and outside the workplace. We predict that by fostering more meaningful relationships between stakeholders that interact in the workplace, we can foster greater satisfaction and ensure more dignity in the workplace.
Through our conversations, we learned that decisions are often made around service workers, but the workers are not involved in the decision-making process. Multiple people told us that they had ideas that would help improve the business by providing better service to the customers, but the management did not care to take their input.
This gave an opportunity for our solution to help management facilitate a greater sense of agency and value at the workplace.
The third insight was about our consumers– carrying forward from our previous phase of research we saw that their schedules prevented them from having the bandwidth to make connections with workers who were not a part of their current social circle.
This translated into the opportunity of using existing individual motivations or common goals as a means to bring the two groups together without added cognitive costs to empathy.
To further visualize the scenarios that we would be working with, we created two personas — one for the worker and the other for the customer.
Zahara is a cashier working in the food sector, and as a result, has built enough of a relationship with customers that she sees day in and day out, to know what they want. Customers give her feedback because she’s who they meet– they have no time to escalate it. But no one at the company is listening to her, and in turn, to the customer.
Nathan has a tough enough life balancing his high career aspirations with his desire to make social connections and maintain important relationships at this point in his life. He expects value for his money, though, in the form of good food options and quality service. If he doesn’t get it, he gives feedback to the employee. He doesn’t have the time, motivation or channels to put efforts to go to the actual decision makers.
With these insights and opportunities, we conducted various sprints of quick and dirty ideation — some that involved blue-sky ideas and some in which we pushed ourselves to think about the details and feasibility.
We came up with the following two concepts that we presented for our final presentation —
How could we leverage the existing motivations of each member of the triad towards enabling empathy? We looked at the model of a Consumer Worker Cooperative to answer this question.
The consumer wants fresh healthy food, the worker wants to feel empowered and equal, and the manager needs to tend to profits for the sustainability of the business. But these need not be mutually exclusive interests.
A multi-stakeholder cooperative structure is one where multiple groups of people have ownership. While their investment can be unequal, it is essentially one member one vote, eliminating the power dynamics that inhibit empathy, and encouraging agency and participation. Furthermore, it also ensures profits go back to the business and to members, rather than disproportionately to the top of a hierarchy.
Cooperatives rely heavily on participation and related processes though. This concept uses technology to breathe new life into them through easy and rewarding ways for customers and employees to engage & act on shared community goals, generating empathy.
An internal tool that aggregates community data on employees and the greater community to identify and organize actions that can be taken to show support.
This concept would be best demonstrated through an example — A recent poll shows that Jewish members of the squirrel hill community feel marginalized and there have been reports of an increasing number of anti-Semitic crimes. By using this platform, a manager can get this data about the community their business is in and then actually see that a majority of their customers are Jewish. By comparing that % with employees, managers can prioritize efforts to support the Jewish community — and set up campaigns that enable employees to come up with an idea to show support. In this case, the employees have decided to add a new kosher option to their menu to show the Jewish community that they are valued. This action creates solidarity between the customers and employees and sparks conversations between the two.
Feedback:
- Is the Gen Z demographic relevant to our concepts? If the concept works for a larger audience, do we need to retain it?
- How can concept 2 work for companies of larger scale?
- Would sticking to only cooperatives mean that we would be restricting the scalability? How can this solution work in conventional capitalist structures of ownership?
