CLIENT International Manufacturing Company
GOAL Client was receiving floor associate feedback of overall dissatisfaction with their work space and support structure in the factory. With wide-ranging feedback, the client was struggling to find the most targeted solutions to meet employee needs and boost morale. The goal was to gain an understanding of the associate experience to drive impactful, long-term solutions
The Research
Ethnography & Contextual Inquiry
In order to understand the full context of day to day operations, interactions, and conversations on the factory floor, TC team spent 2 weeks observing and speaking with workers during both day and night shifts. To further build the experiential narrative around our observations, we periodically conducted brief intercept interviews during key moments or events.
Focus Groups
While our observations and interviews gave us strong context around behaviors and individual perceptions, end-of-shift focus groups allowed us to complete the experience narrative by gathering group-level feedback on what we saw day in and day out.
The Tools
Psychological Modeling
Our findings unveiled a very complex system of initial dissatisfaction exacerbated over time by triggering events. These events created and continued to build the employee-to-employee story around issues in the workplace. In order to help the client understand and act on triggering events moving forward, we integrated key pain points into an illustrated core belief model.
Core Experience Map
The purpose of this map is to illustrate the complex relationships between core dissatisfactions (beliefs) and the events that trigger and perpetuate them. This map helps to illustrate that tackling one specific complaint won’t necessarily solve the core issue of dissatisfaction, but that solutions should be focused on a more thematic level.
Empathy Map
This map helps to dive into a more detailed snapshot of what any given employee might be seeing, feeling, hearing, and thinking, and how these experiential factors relate to dissatisfaction.
Scenario Cards
Scenario cards each cover one specific complaint or issue that management has been presented with in the past. Within each card, research-driven thoughts, feelings, and actions are defined around each one of these issues. These cards serve as problem solving tools, so whenever management hears a specific complaint, they can reach for that scenario card, understand the underlying experiential issues, and tackling it from its core rather than its surface.
Solutions Workshops
This workshop served as the moment that the TC team and management team can get together to synthesize insights and begin learning to interpret and utilize the experience toolkit. It allows everyone to come into the same space to react, pose concerns, and begin to ideate solutions for these key problem areas. The output of this workshop was a series of Solution Card that outline action plans for addressing key problem areas from their experiential core.
Management came away with specific action plans to tackle employee dissatisfaction from a place of empathy and core understanding.
