strive + thrive
A workplace tool to make work more meaningful through reflection, gratitude, and building trust.
overview 📄
Making work more fulfilling
This past summer, my team worked together in the Design for America’s Future of Work Summer Innovation Lab to explore the changing landscape of work and find out how we can transform work experiences to be more fulfilling.
Alongside with my team, I did thorough research on the landscape of work, conducting interviews with working individuals and analyzing testimonies to find meaningful themes (i.e. ownership, gratitude, and growth).
My initial idea of modeling strive+thrive after an elementary school classroom resonated with everyone, and this physical modeling concept was used to conduct diary and goal setting testing activities with users.
the problem 🤔
With generational shifts and the COVID-19 pandemic, research has shown that people are switching careers more than ever before in favor of work life balance, environment, and fulfillment. They’re facing burnout and imposter syndrome. And yet, they don’t get time to reflect on their work, or they don’t think of it.
How can we support individuals in their personal growth to make their work more meaningful?
Take Alex, for example:
the solution💡
Strive + thrive is a tool for individuals to reflect on their work, foster trust in the workplace, and facilitate gratitude among employees.
key features
Center Space
A communal space for team activities.
• Activities consistently hosted by facilitators
• Promotes team bonding and mutual respect
The Journal
A place for individuals to reflect on their work:
• Time log for accountability
• Given prompts
• Integrated into workspace
Goal Wall
• SMART goal framework
• Given prompts
• Reminders
research 📚
After the COVID-19 pandemic, what trends and problems currently exist in work?
desk research
To figure out what area we wanted to focus on, we first had to get a sense of what is currently salient among workplaces. Across the several articles we reviewed online, we found the following common themes:
scoping the problem + HCW statement
Once we got a general sense of important trends and issues in work, we consolidated the themes into four important categories that we could address:
• Burnout
• Community
• Personal growth
• Meaningful work
We brainstormed several How-Can-We (HCW) statements for each category, trying to think of how we could help and improve the work experience for each one.
As a team, we voted on the statements that resonated with us the most. Two out of the three top statements revolved around personal growth.
As a team, we voted on the statements, and the winner was… (drumroll)
How can we support individuals in their personal growth to make their work more meaningful?
focused HCW desk research
focused HCW desk research
Now that we knew what we wanted to focus on within work, we did more desk research specifically on the two elements within the HCW statement: personal growth and meaningfulness.
We found the following insights:
⭐️ Ownership over work results in a sense of meaningfulness.
⭐️ Positive experiences make work more meaningful.
⭐️ Personal growth consists of thriving (learning new things, feeling energized) and flourishing (motivated, good mental health).
⭐️ Qualities of meaningful work include impactful, challenging, and reflective work.
⭐️ People are more likely to thrive and grow when they find their job meaningful.
Overall, making work more meaningful supports personal growth.
talking to people who work 💭
With a clear HCW statement and a good overall sense of the work landscape, we wanted to know what people who work thought.
brainstorming interview questions
We decided to interview those with more than 3+ years work experience in their industry. To learn from people who had been working for a while, we brainstormed questions to learn more about their experiences and values in work. We affinity mapped the questions and seven themes emerged that we were curious about:
• Meaningful work
• Career change/personal growth
• Career Growth
• Career goals
• Current career
• Burnout
• Motivation
With an interview protocol that covered the seven areas above, we talked to 10 people about their career and working experiences, learning about their experiences and what they had taken away from them .
affinity mapping: finding themes in our conversations
Each person of the team first individually analyzed the interview responses, and we then grouped together to share our insights with each other. Some key insights I found among the conversations were:
⭐️ Collectivism among employees drives growth and motivation.
⭐️ A good work environment is a strong driver for staying in a job.
⭐️ External validation and being able to see the results of one’s work makes work more fulfilling.
⭐️ Working towards goals career-wise drives a sense of meaningfulness.
⭐️ Investing too much time on work and not enough time on yourself leads to burnout.
Looking at the takeaways we all got from the people we interviewed, we made 3 specific design goals to address some of the major problems and opportunities we saw.
We then converted the three goals into HCW statements to start thinking about what solutions could look like, and how we would be able to tell that these solutions would make a difference for the better. To assess the effectiveness of our solution in the future, we made measures of success for each HCW statement.
ideation 🧠⚙️
It was time to take what we had learned and start thinking of how we could address people’s concerns and make their work meaningful.
As a team, we brainstormed ideas for each HCW statement, and then came up with ideas that could address all the HCW statements at once. It definitely wasn’t an easy feat—we were addressing 3 different areas at once!
Among our ideas, they included card decks, forums, journaling, workshops, and more. One of my ideas resonated the most among everyone—a digital space, modeled after an elementary school classroom, in which there were different sections with different functions, such as the goal wall, work-style wall, journal shelf, and more. The excitement of a familiar childhood experience made a meaningful manifestation of all our research.
testing the MVP 📓
It was definitely an ambitious idea—an interface with so many elements that would probably add on to their already long list of things to keep track of. Before jumping forward and creating the whole prototype, we wanted to see what potential users would think of the idea first.
Each person first made an interpretation of their idea, which would then inform the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that we would use to test with users. We decided to focus on three parts of the idea that would test for one HCW each:
• Reflection activity
• Goal-setting activity (not pictured)
• Diary study
Reflection activity
Diary study
We tested the MVP with 9 participants, and received the following feedback and thoughts on it:
• Measurable/quantifying goals is useful
• They don’t set goals and reflect as often as they should
• The STAR framework was helpful towards creating goals
• Putting things down in writing made it feel more tangible
• The gratitude wall was meaningful—it prompted them to think about the people they appreciate
Some areas of improvement:
• Journal prompts were too long
• They often forgot to do the journal if not reminded
• Possibly making the journal physical
• Making the journal less frequent of an obligation
reflection and next steps 💬
I'm so grateful to have worked with such a passionate and creative team. Thank you so much to Avani, Heather, Grace, and Gary, for your amazing insights and being a pleasure to work with! Despite this project being over a remote setting, we were able to overcome that obstacle to work together effectively and do amazing things.
Our homebase—organized chaos!
I learned a lot during the process—being able to work and think together through each phase, create questions so that they effectively incite the information we're curious about, being able to draw inner meanings from experiences and spoken words—and so many more. It was an in-depth exposure to user research.
Some insights and next steps for the future:
A balance between research and building
We were able to find out so much about the work landscape and dive deep into the problems that people faced. However, with the timeline of the Future of Work Summer Innovation Lab, this left limited time to develop our solution. It is difficult to thoroughly explore the problem space and also adequately build a prototype in a limited amount of time. Perhaps, with more time, we could have more of an opportunity to implement our findings from our extensive research into a solution. Reflecting on this experience, I hope that I can be more mindful in the future with time management, and do research efficiently and sufficiently to be able to utilize that towards adequately building a solution.
Developing the prototype further
Continuing from the last point, I am proud of the insights we found, our design goals, and the solution we came up with to address them. It wouldn't have been possible without everyone's hard work and the time of the interviewees. As a team, we agreed that it would be great to see this idea be developed further. It has a lot of potential, and I'd like to see this in an interactive prototype form—how cool would that be? In the future, we hope to create a high-fidelity prototype and test strive+thrive further.
