How we got employees to return to the office after 1.5 years of remote work
After spending 1.5 years working remotely, RBC teams are now being asked to adopt a hybrid work style by going to the office 2-3 days a week. As part of the employee collaboration team, we were tasked with creating tools that assist and encourage this transition as well as discover and address pain points as they arise.
Results:
✅ Established and implemented all success metrics for this project.
✅ Mentored a junior designer through creating this experience on web.
✅ Led user research for this project that ended up shaping multiple projects.
🏆 Received an award for “driven to create impact”.
Project Team (23):
2 UI/UX Designers, 1 Design Manager, 10 Developers, 2 Data Scientists, 3 QA Analysts, 2 Product Managers, and 1 Scrum Master.
Understand
I wanted to gain a better understanding of why the initial wave of employees were volunteering to be in-office and what issues existing hybrid teams were encountering when planning to be on premises.
User Research
I led our design team of 3 through the user research interviews and administered a company-wide survey. I interviewed 25 employees across 8 different departments in 3 countries (Canada, USA, UK).
View full user research r
Key insights from research
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Employees are more likely to come into work when they know certain team members are working in-person. More than meetings or individual work, people want to go back to the office for the social aspect. Employees also feel closer to the colleagues they’ve worked with in-person.
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The social aspect has changed. Although collaborative work is easier with an all in-person team, engaging in casual conversations has become more challenging. It's also difficult to predict when individuals outside of your immediate team will be on-site.
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Teams found the task of coordinating in-person days frustrating. They used tools like Slack and Webex, spending 30 minutes to an hour each week to determine when everyone could meet in person. As more team members started attending in-person, the time required for this planning increased.
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People managers and employees both prefer to have their weekly 1-on-1 conversations in person. For managers, understanding body language is important when handling sensitive issues.
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Employees engaged in frequent in-person collaborative work, such as managers and directors, often feel less available to remote colleagues due to their active work schedules. However, individual contributors do not feel this way.
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If an employee is in-office but their coworkers are remote, they end up spending most of their time in meeting rooms taking video calls. This is frustrating because they don’t get the social interaction they came to the office for.
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If people go into work for a meeting, they are likely to stay at the office for the rest of the day.
The Problem
The primary reason people wanted to go on premises was to meet up with their team but it was often difficult to schedule in-person days. Employees also wanted to meet new people on their extended team but didn’t know when they were going to be available. This led us to ask,
how can we help employees gain visibility into who’s going to be in-office?
Research Artifacts
For the MVP, I wanted to focus on providing a solution hybrid managers, hybrid individual contributors and hybrid collaborators. Incorporating remote only and in-person only employees will be important later in the hybrid transition.
User Segmentation
Though the overarching hybrid employee segmentation + key insights would’ve sufficed, I felt that I needed to create memorable user personas for our team so it’s easier to identify where the employee frustrations and motivations are coming from. These are often lost in lots of documentation and writing so having a reference for who we're resolving issues for, particularly during uncertain times, seemed beneficial for this project.
Hybrid employees whose days are dominated by meetings.
Individual contributors whose days are not dominated by meetings.
Hybrid people managers.
User Journey
I created a user journey that aims to understand the experience of all employees returning to premises. This journey kept changing over time as official restrictions, company procedures and employee behaviour changed during the pandemic.
Critical Pain Point
Employees don’t have a way to determine the best in-person day without the laborious process of repeatedly asking everyone their schedule.
MVP
For the first version, I prioritized the following features:
Employees can enter their own hybrid schedule
Employees can view other’s hybrid schedule
Employees are able to create a simple list to keep track of their team’s schedule.
Product Flows & Constraints
Employees would only be able to add their in-office days up to 3 months from today’s date. This is to ensure calendars are up to date and employees aren’t setting them 6 months in advance and forgetting about them. (3 month estimation determined via survey).
For the MVP, we want to encourage employees to input their schedules before viewing everyone else’s.
Employees should be able to view people coming in on a specific day.
Employees should be able to view someone’s picture, job title at RBC and name before adding them to their list. This is so they don’t add someone with a duplicate name and job title.
Low fidelity Wireframes
Key High fidelity Wireframes
Colleague in-office days at a glance
The "In-Office Schedules" tile provides employees with a preview of how many team members will be in the office in the upcoming days.
View in-office days of colleague
See when a specific colleague will be going to work. This can help with arranging in-person meetings or events on those days.
Remove colleagues on your team
This list auto-populated with colleagues on your immediate team via organizational hierarchy. Employees can remove colleagues they do not want to see in-person days of.
Add colleagues on to team
Working with someone not on your team? You can search users by their name and add them to your list. The photos job titles are mentioned so employees don’t accidentally add another user with the same name.
View your in-person schedule
Employees can view their own in-person schedule for up to 3 months. The current day is highlighted with a yellow circle.
Edit your in-person schedule
Employees can set a repeating schedule or select individual dates.
UX/Product Metrics
I created the product metrics that would determine the success or failure of this feature.
MVP North star metric: accuracy of in-office schedules stated by employees. Are employees actually going in the days they’ve set in their schedule?
All metrics for MVP (North star, Adoption, Engagement, Retention)
My Takeaways
When creating any tracking tool, it’s important to be aware of the language you’re using throughout the app. For Waldo, we initially used the term “Watchlist” for seeing other people’s schedules. However, employees felt that because of this wording, we were tracking other items as well (location, employee information, etc). By switching to “List”, this assumption was eliminated.
92% of the users said they wanted a year long calendar so they could input in-office days. However, through the metrics we found that less than 10% of users set their schedule past 3 weeks.
While dates are super important for clarity, a lot of employees at RBC operate on a day of the week basis. This is due to recurring meetings and bi-weekly planning in agile environments. When the user has trust in the week being presented, they overlook the date and simply select the dates.
Maintaining the accuracy of features where user input is consistently required is hard to do. We used a combination of push and in-app notifications and email reminders to ensure it was as accurate as possible. This is why we had to limit repeating schedules to 3 months despite being heavily requested.
Results
✅ Established and implemented all success metrics for this project.
✅ Mentored a junior designer through creating this experience on web.
✅ Led user research for this project.
✅ Received an award for “driven to create impact”.