SIMPLIFYING ASSOCIATE ATTENDANCE THROUGH COVID-19
Case Study - 2020
During the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020, attendance variances (changes in schedule, including late-in and absences) steadily increased. To support our associates, the company initiated multiple updates to the attendance policies and determined to create a simpler supervisor experience of checking and resolving these hourly variances. These changes reduced the weekly tracking efforts and simplified the discipline tracking needs in each location. We also reduced the necessary applications to input a single variance from three to one.
Collaborative Partners
David Mansour, Product Manager
Reid Tarentino, Development Manager
Kathleen Lawder, Sr. Manager - Technology
WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?
The company observed a rapid increase in associates that were late/absent causing increased time spent handling these occurrences and disciplinary needs. How might we achieve a simpler variance management process and reduce the time spent managing variances?
HERE'S THE STORY
With planning underway upon joining the effort, the multiple teams focused on a west coast regional research effort to discover more about the process and build empathy with our associates and managers. Unfortunately, this was started in February 2020. With the impending lockdown, we pivoted our research to the Southeast and conducted 90 supervisor interviews at over 50 locations within a week. On this trip, we were able to capture much of the manager experience and even found that about 20% of the locations were using manual efforts to track absences and initiate discipline efforts. This data fed our research process, and we were able to build journey maps, service blueprints and personas, specifically focused on the impact of Covid-19 on our hourly associates. With our initial research, we built a remote testing plan to validate our designs and included A/B testing on several contentious areas. Upon validation, we quickly built out user stories and finished the development of these features within a 4-month period. Upon completion, we tracked reductions in the number of variances submitted as well as the time spent processing them. Throughout the effort, we produced weekly stakeholder updates and held Q/A sessions.
OUR USERS
Associate Support Supervisors
Hourly Associates
Store Managers
HR Managers
SCOPE & CONSTRAINTS
Affecting 2,500+ locations and 400,000+ associates
Completed rollout to all locations in 2020
Due to the changing atmosphere of Covid-19, we were under pressure to deliver these tools as quickly as possible
Coordinated over 90 interviews with supervisors in March 2020, the week before the covid lockdown
This effort involved multiple team collaboration within the Human Resources area
ROLE & RESPONSIBILITIES
Strategy
Research Planning
Collaborative regional interviews
Objectives and Key Results (OKR) Creation
Research
Heuristic Review
Subject Matter Expert Interviews
Stakeholder Mapping
Stakeholder Interviews
User Interviews
Persona Creation
Task Mapping
Journey mapping
Service Blueprint
Metrics Discovery and Analysis
UI Design
Low-Fidelity ideation with balanced team
High-Fidelity Mockups
Design Critique Submission
Usability Prototypes
Usability
Usability Testing
A/B Testing
Stakeholder Presentation of results
Collaboration
Iterative Team Updates
Feature Prioritization
Roadmap Creation
Presentation Design
User Story Creation with balanced team
OUTCOMES
Reduction of weekly variance processing by managers from up to 8 hours/week to less than 30 min/week
Reduction of unqualifying variances processed by managers by over 20%
Introduced a unifying design architecture for all HR products with the Material Design Style Guide [See the case study]
We found that managers would put off variance tracking for weeks, due to the overwhelming time commitment. With the rapid accumulation of variances for specific associates, this could lead to rapid disciplinary action including termination.
We saw several locations tracking variance and discipline manually, due to their want to shield their associates from unnecessary disciplinary actions
We were able to reduce a complicated multi-service data call, to an in-meeting “phone call” where two subject matter experts used the metaphor of a phone call to exchange information that was necessary to process the associate variance