Sutherland Labs- An Employee Led Digital Workplace Strategy.
Sutherlands’ client was looking to understand what tools their employees use to work across different geographies to enable a more productive remote work setting.
This ethnographic research project spanned across UK, Europe, Honk Kong, Japan and including remote research in Australia and other countries. For this project, I worked part-time and collaborated with six anthropologists and ethnographers and User Researchers.
Understand.
Our purpose was not only to understand employees needs, their pain-points and suggestions, but to look at how we can enable them to work more productively remote. How would an organisational change like this, impact the company culture?
For this reason, we set out an employee survey followed by an array of focus groups, in-situ and remote interviews to get introduced into their roles, duties and workspace.
The Focus groups structure consisted of three sections—an introduction section where people discussed what software and hardware. The main section where individuals posted “what works, what not and solutions” on all levels and finally a group sharing debrief on theming key issues. Remote interviews worked similarly. However, they were structured on an individual basis. In-situ interviews helped us observe the employees desk setting first-hand and discuss their experience in more detail.
Create.
We worked in pairs and shared the locations visited. During the sessions, we worked in turns, facilitating and annotating for each other, creating a spreadsheet database for the team, which we then used to analyse the data in seven main themes of findings.
Environment
Communication & Channels
Collaboration
Software & Hardware
Processes
Organisational Change
Culture
Global systems should be scalable across countries. We get a feeling that systems are UK centric rather than considering the needs of different regions. For Singapore human interaction is crucial and the market has a dynamic structure. While we are encouraged to go digital. - Sample participant
My Project lead and I interviewed Australia, Luxembourg, Bermuda and Italy offices remotely while we visited the UK, Honk Kong and Japan offices. The roles ranged from investors to technicians. We created our personas based on attitudes and behaviour criteria, as seen below.
Newbie, seniority and old-time
Attitude to tech
Attitude to change
‘I work across teams’ vs ‘I work within my area’
Attitudes of flexible working vs attitudes to workspace.
Deliver.-
We delivered a set six themes of findings across geographies, a set of 13 personas including their attitudes and behaviour; their user cases including paint points and solutions. Last we complemented our findings with an equal set of quick fix and long term recommendations informing the organisations Digital Strategy. You can find out more at Sutherland Labs post.