Employee Relationship Manager App
The Ten Spot Employee Relationship Manager (ERM) is a platform-based tool that monitors passive and active data to provide managers useful insights about their employees.
The Ten Spot Employee Relationship Manager (ERM) is a tool designed to make managers heroes. It does this by monitoring passive and active data to provide managers useful insights about their employees.
My role in this project was UX design, UI design, research, and assisting with product ideation.
My tools were Figma, Whimsical, Google Sheets, and Zoom.
Company: Ten Spot. Ten Spot is a startup designed to bring remote teams together and improve engagement through features like virtual classes, challenges, and trivia. It has grown to focus on improving management.
Overview
The Problem
Flexible work environments are making it hard to know how to empower my team. Even if I do know, I’m only getting a partial understanding of how employees are feeling and what I would need to do to get them fully engaged and empowered.
Ten Spot will capture active and passive information about your team to give you a comprehensive understanding of how to get to know and empower each team member. We will monitor active and passive data to provide managers insights about their employees on demand and proactively prior to a 1:1.
The Solution
User Research Round 1
I worked together with Ten Spot’s Product Manager, Joel Hall, to write an interview script.
We then interviewed 20 managers from varying companies and locations across the US. We asked 15 questions about their experiences and strategies as a manager, biggest pain points. Interviewees were also asked to give feedback on early stage mid fidelity mockups.
After this initial round of interviews, we comprised a second round of interview questions that were more focused on how managers build relationships and recognize accomplishments. This second round also focused more towards feedback on mid-fidelity mockups that I had designed after Round 1.
Research Analysis
After an extensive round of affinity mapping, I was able to break our research into 6 categories of findings.
“Good Manager & Team Qualities” Finding:
“Good Manager & Team Qualities” Finding:
People want an environment & manager that is friendly, open, and promotes growth.
People want to give and be given trust and avoid micromanagement.
These qualities lead to happier and more successful teams.
“Pain Points” Finding:
Good communication is one of the most important and most difficult qualities for teams.
Manager struggle to communicate goals and expectations, especially across different learning and personality styles.
Remote work makes communication even harder because of different timezones, lack of in person opportunities, and a struggle to onboard.
Remote work increases burnout and decreases communication because of an overload of formal, scheduled meetings.
“Product” Finding:
Managers would love a product that helps them build relationships with their team and that helps their team (and themselves) to perform better.
Managers are worried about maintaining trust. They don’t want their team to feel like they are being tracked (ie via passive data collection) or micromanaged (given too many suggestions).
They would love to see a user guide that gives info on strength and working /communication styles. Separating work and personal info would be great.
Managers want a way to keep track of info they learned in conversations and a way to reference it later.
Managers want to keep track of important information like milestones and birthdays.
Managers want help tracking growth and employee goals.
Managers want help assigning work and would like more visibility for them and their team into individual’s workloads, capacity, and sentiment.
Managers want more visibility into individual’s availability - meetings, vacation days, time zone syncing
Managers think sentiment surveys are a great way to find out pulse in a non-intrusive manner.
Managers think anonymous feedback would solve pain points
“Sharing” Finding:
Most companies send out a formal sentiment survey during the year, but its effectiveness is unclear
Most managers enjoy usuing casual conversation as a way to get to know their team
Icebreakers and prompts are a fun tool to get conversations started
“Challenges” Finding:
Managers want their team to focus on collaboration rather than competition
It is hard to find a way to fairly/appropriately reward success
Incentives and rewards are the best way to increase motivation and morale.
“Sharing Tools” Finding
Most companies send out a formal sentiment survey during the year, but its effectiveness is unclear
Most managers enjoy usuing casual conversation as a way to get to know their team
Icebreakers and prompts are a fun tool to get conversations started
Features
After gathering and analyzing data, I was able to work with my Product Manager to produce a list of features. I then got to work on mid fidelity mockups, which I designed using Whimsical.
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User Guides
Each user will have an app-based User Guide, which is a centralized location for everything a manager or team member may need to know about this person.
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Slack/Teams Integration
We will meet people where they are (Slack/Teams) to actively collect information for User Guides, and to deliver managers formulated insights.
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Insights
Insights about each user’s workload, sentiment, growth, and 1:1 tools. These will be generated based on information entered into User Guides, collected from Slack/Teams, and pulled from app integrations.
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Accomplishments Tracking
Users will track accomplishments within their User Guides. This will help themselves and their managers in career growth. We will facilitate this through Slack/Teams messaging/data collection.
Competitive Research
Before creating my mid and high fidelity wireframes, I researched other competitors and neighbors in the space. I drew inspiration from their layouts and functionality. I did hands one research by signing up for a close competitor, WorkSpace, and using this tool with my PM for a few weeks.
A few of my biggest inspirations were Linkedin, Facebook, Workpattersm and IMBD
User Research Round 2
After the initial round of interviews and design, I comprised a second round of interview questions that were more focused on how managers build relationships and recognize accomplishments. This second round also focused more towards feedback on mid-fidelity mockups that I had designed after Round 1.
High Fidelity Wireframes
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Employee Information & Notes
All important info for managers & teammates to know will be displayed at the top of each person’s “User Guide.” This includes their job title, local time, location, contact info, and birthday.
Users can also include a short bio and fun fact. This helps managers get to know employees, especially when they are new.
Workload and Sentiment will be data we capture daily in Slack and/or Teams using a quick survey. This helps managers better assign work and understand how their employees are doing.
we can also see a button for Manager Notes here which will be a centralized place managers can easily record personal notes after each 1:1.
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Accomplishment & Activity Feed
Accomplishments will recorded primarily through Slack/Teams via Ten Spot driven prompts and auto fill technology. They will populate into an accomplishments timeline.
Teammates & managers can give recognition through Shout-outs, which are short messages that populate on Slack/Teams, the company’s public Ten Spot Activity Feed and on each individual’s Activity Feed. Shout-outs can also be tied to monetary rewards. -
Things to Know
Each user will be able to fill out their Things to Know section on an ongoing basis. This will be a compilation of work-related and personal questions they think is important or interesting to share with their manager and team.
Questions include things like “When do you best like to take meetings?” or “What is your favorite movie of all time”
These can be populated here in their profile or via data collection from icebreakers asked by our Ten Spot Slack/Teams app.
This helps managers and team mates to get to know each other in a remote world, feel more connected, and have more valuable meetings.
Thank you for viewing.
This is an ongoing project and not yet launched. I loved how well we attended to the UX design process in this creation and it was great to give so much attention to real managers ideas and feedback. To hear about progress, just reach out!