Why it’s worth checking out: Building an experience that activates managers to sustainably advance diversity and empowerment on their teams (2019)
During the Patterns internship, I worked with the Employee Experience Design squad, a subsection of HR dedicated to optimizing the IBMer experience. As the sole UX researcher in my intern team of 5, I led my team through a research-intensive 6-week sprint.
Our team was tasked with an exciting, gargantuan project: to develop a way for managers at IBM to understand the value of diverse, empowered teams, and give them a way to assess, assemble, and track their progress towards building one of their own.
Working with such a critical- yet sensitive- topic required nuance, empathy, and patience from the whole team. A major part of research focused on deeply understanding the objective and context.
I guided my team through masses of data on diversity and inclusion (D&I) within teams and in tech. We logged countless existing internal resources, and initiatives on D&I, and documented recruitment and hiring practices in place.
Through interviews, we identified 4 major pain points impeding the development of diverse teams. I followed up with hiring managers, HR leadership, and D&I representatives to expand on challenges. We crafted an as-is and to-be scenarios based on 3 manager personas developed from interviews.
To understand the employee perspective, I created a qualitative survey to capture self-reported sense of belongingness and empowerment participants felt on their teams, along with voluntary disclosure of individual demographics.
Using design thinking, we ideated concepts for a platform that mobilized managers to understand and continually improve upon their team’s level of ‘diversity’ and empowerment.
Research from this project and qualitative survey data was responsibly handed off to our sponsor leads to continue analysis.
Since the project wrapped in 2019, our research and deliverables have been incorporated into the greater Racial Equity in Design initiative. It has been referenced specifically for restructuring hiring practices and promoting the recruitment and advancement of Black designers at IBM.
Research highlights: deciphering a complex hiring process; defining and operationalizing ‘diversity’ while adhering to the Equal Opportunity Act; and guiding a heart-to-heart session on diversity, discrimination, and our own personal identities with my team.