Project Partner

Duration

Jan to June 2020

VISA London Innovation Center

Responsibilities

Desk research
Prototyping
Branding
Workshop facilitation
UI/UX design

Challenge

Define factors that adversely affect the wellbeing of remote workers and help companies build healthier remote workplaces.

PEBBLE

In response to the pandemic, many companies have moved to remote work and employees are consequently experiencing new challenges. Blurred boundaries between work and life, longer work hours and social isolation are just some of the issues contributing to growing mental health concerns among these remote workers.

Outcome

Approach

In this project, we conducted workshops to start a conversation, gather insights, test out our hypothesis, validate and receive feedback from users. In total, we conducted 39 different types of workshops with employees from different industries and countries.

Why is happiness important for companies?

With rising concerns around employee wellbeing, the importance of employee happiness from a company’s perspective are clearer than ever:

Understanding Employee Wellbeing: Method

In order to understand the factors that positively and negatively impact employee wellbeing, we used a combination of surveys and anonymous workshops. In total, we received 70 survey responses and conducted 24 anonymous workshops with members of the VIC team and general public.

As well as directly asking participants about their problems and contrasting their pre- and post-pandemic work habits, we had them walk us through a week in their life and tracked mood changes to understand them even better.

Key Insights

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When working remotely, people become used to a sedentary lifestyle and lack awareness of their wellbeing. They need a nudge to help them form a healthier working habits.

Employees are unaware or not trusting of their company’s existing internal wellbeing programs while organisations lack employee wellbeing information of those working from home. There needs to be a channel to exchange this relevant information.

When working remotely, most interactions with peers are related to task handover. They miss having more informal interactions with peers.

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Meet James

Based on our previous interviews and research, we created our persona - James.

Let’s see how we can help James find his happiness in the workplace?

Following our background research on positive psychology and discussions with employees, we conducted co-creation sessions to develop an early concept and tested it with target users who ranged from entry-level to management-level employees. From this, we generated our service concept, Pebble.

What does Pebble do?

Pebble’s purpose is to set boundaries between work and life and help remote workers build healthier working habits.

Deep work function

When users have work to do, Pebble helps them to enter a deep work state by providing a specific 1-minute cognitive fitness exercise. It also updates other colleagues about their work status to reduce unnecessary disturbances.

Virtual Cafe

The lack of informal interaction with colleagues was a major factor contributing to reduced happiness among employees. Pebble provides users with a virtual cafe where employees can spontaneously spend a few minutes catching up with each others.

A Personalised Pebble

We created 4 pebbles based on broader wellbeing personalities we had generated. Users are matched with their most compatible Pebble through a personality quiz. The aim is to deliver a virtual assistant whose behaviour is tailored to the individual’s preferences.

What Did Users Think Of Pebble?

To generate feedback, we conducted five in-depth prototype sessions, using Figma to simulate real interactions with Pebble. We received feedback from entry-level through to management-level employees.

Prototype Session

Testers especially liked the sense of connection and bonding with the team that Pebble could provide. They believed the deep work mode could help them be more productive, because switching work modes is not currently something they practice. They also liked the playful and personalised nature of the assistant.

As for what they wished for, users wanted Pebble to be cross-platform so that they could access it across different devices.

Intergrations

Many users also wondered whether it would be possible to integrate Pebble into their existing office collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and Slack, for a more streamlined user experience.

Microsoft Teams

Slack

The Impact of Pebble

Pebble enables employees to focus on meaningful work for a greater sense of fulfilment and enjoy stronger social connections with peers.

Pebble brings a healthier and more productive team for team leaders and the company as a whole. It also creates an effective way for the HR department to understand the wellbeing status of employees.

Outside the organisations that directly use our service, Pebble partners with existing office collaboration tools and wellbeing programs to deliver the ultimate wellbeing-focused working environment.

Takeaways

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The anonymity of employee data with clients during research helped bring forward unbiased responses.

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Bringing different stakeholders into the ideation phase brings deeper insights

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Each workshop or interview experience needs to be carefully planned and made playful so that the interviewee is more relaxed and willing to talk more during the session.

In the end, I would like to thank all the people who helped us on our project, whose participation made the whole working process really enjoyable.