Internship experience at Valuelabs
Summer internship @Valuelabs
In the Summer of 2021, I worked with the User Experience team at Valuelabs. Here's a summary of my work and responsibilities. Please feel free to reach out to know more!
Reimagined the Remote onboarding Experience for Valuelabs
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Created a remote onboarding platform for the wave of employees joining Valuelabs remotely because of the pandemic.
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Responsibilities - interviewed over 20 stakeholders, analyzed the research insights to propose ideas to increase employee retention by making the remote onboarding process more efficient.
Presented my work to the UX team, lead and clients
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Collaborated closely with UX designers, Design Leads, Managers, Developers and clients to understand different stakeholder needs.
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Presented my work to the entire UX team as well as the Head of Design at Valuelabs.
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Attended discovery and ideation meetings with clients. This helped me improve my presentation skills based on my audience.
Contributed to internal projects
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Apart from client facing projects, I also worked on design initiatives undertaken by the UX team - The Design Inspire Conference was one the major events conducted by Valuelabs to make design education accessible to everyone.
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Contributed to this event by being a part of the Service design and Engagement team.
THE CLIFF NOTES:
Purdue University Specialization Project
THE PROBLEM
Covid-19 has caused a wave of changes in how companies operate. With this change, the current employee onboarding experience fails to work effectively as most of the in-person interactions have to be done remotely bringing about a lot of friction.
Did you know the average US employer spends $4000 and 24 days hiring a new worker? After expending so many resources finding a new employee, the last thing you want is for that employee to walk out the door shortly after they are hired.
Approach
Had the opportunity to build this system from ground up
Early on, I realized that there was frustration due to a mismatch between what employees needed from onboarding and the actual experience.
So, I started off interviewing some new employees who were about to join to understand their needs from this process.
Purdue University Specialization Project
A VISUAL OF EMPLOYEE NEEDS FROM ONBOARDING
Identifying
pain
points
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Contrasted employee expectations with the reality of the onboarding experience.
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Interviewed current employees to understand their experiences joining Valuelabs in hindsight.
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Spoke to other departments who were involved in the onboarding process to understand their restrictions, pain points and frustrations. This included teams like HR, IT, team managers etc.
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Mapped out these different insights in new employee journey map
CURRENT EMPLOYEE ONBOARDING JOURNEY MAP
Identifying
opportunities
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Categorized pain points according to their nature
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Helped me propose solutions based on urgency, feasibility and time.
MAIN PROBLEMS I FOCUSED ON
Inefficient orientation
Sessions were too long, inflexible in schedule, not engaging enough and only a little information is retained.
Delayed communication
Employees can't find immediate answers to questions during onboarding due to an overload of questions, there are delays in response by concerned departments.
Confusion about tasks
Often times, employees are constantly left confused about next steps in the first few weeks of their job. As a new employee, there are hundreds of formailites to get done.
Proposed
solutions
A good orientation session provides on-demand content that quickly and effectively teaches them the essentials about how your company operates and how they can best contribute to its success. I designed a platform for an interactive video orientation that uses a situation-based Q-A approach to learn how to apply company policies in real-life contexts.
Emphasizing the "buddy system", these sessions can be taken along with a fellow new hire to build connections with others.
"Learning should be 70% doing, 20% conversation with peers and less than 10% of reading notes on your own"
-Centre for Creative Leadership
Interactive, video orientation
ValueBot for answering questions
Create a knowledge bot that receives and tracks questions by employees over time to create a knowledge base for future use.
When someone asks a question, the employee can receive an automated response based on previous data collected in the knowledge base instead of having to wait for a response. Can be integrated into workchat.
Limitation: Long-term solution as it will take a longer time to build the knowledge base
Task Checklist
A dedicated checklist tab within the CAAPTECH portal where employees can keep track of and access their onboarding activities all in one place.
A Progess bar showing how many tasks are remaining to be done is shown, a timeline with tasks detailed out by date, and quick access to completing these tasks
Key
Learnings
Adjusting to remote work
Here are some things that I did during my 8 week long remote internship that made remote work fruitful:
1) Constant updates about the status of projects/activities to concerned team members.
2) Recreating water-cooler conversations with others on your team by having regular informal bonding sessions.
3) Being proactive to seek out feedback.
4) Keeping the work environment light-hearted in otherwise tough times.
The importance of curiosity and constant learning
One of the great things about my internship experience was getting to work with people who were genuinely curious and excited about design. During my time at Valuelabs, I attended weekly sessions about Anthropology in Design led by an expert in the field. It was inspiring to see even senior designers participate with enthusiasm and curiosity.