Returnity

Context

Master’s Thesis in Design for Social Innovation, Alumni Scholarship Award Recipient, Selected for GroundFloor Incubator as a start-up venture

Introduction

A Master’s Thesis for the MFA in Design for Social Innovation is a year-long design project where students have to identify a need within a community, conduct qualitative and quantitative research, scope the problem, prototype and co-create with their community, and then build and test their final intervention.

My thesis partner, Catalina Cipri, and I began our project wanting to address this problem:

Women make up 51% of the workforce today. However, there are still significantly fewer women in leadership positions than men. In fact, only 23% of C-suite roles in the U.S. are held by women.

Our design process was far from linear, but it involved all of the following steps along the way:

Research

Research Questions: 1. What current barriers exist for women to access leadership positions? 2. What specific moments or periods during a woman’s career are the most challenging and have the greatest effect on her ability to access leadership positions?

Activities: Stakeholder mapping, surveys, stakeholder interviews with working women, HR managers, leaders, executives, and subject matter experts.

Key Insights: Across the board, women expressed that a pivotal moment in their career was when they had their first child. This appeared to be a root cause for why women were not able to access leadership positions later in their careers. Here were some of the themes we heard:

• Women are worried about what taking a break to have a child will mean for their career

• Working moms feel like they have to ‘do it all’

• Working moms often feel conflicted by competing desires to do well at work and be present with their children 

“Having children has completely changed my career. It’s affected every decision I’ve made.” - Mai, working mom

Problem Framing

Research Questions: 3. What types of support do working moms need to have a successful transition back to work after having a child? 4. What barriers do companies face in providing for the needs of working moms/parents?

Activities: Journey mapping, card sorting, ideation workshops, early prototyping, and additional interviews with key stakeholders including working moms, working dads, HR professionals, and other company leaders.

Key Insights:

• Lack of information. Companies often don’t know what working moms need and the responsibility to ask for support often falls on them. 

• Support from boss and colleagues.  Not all working moms feel comfortable advocating for themselves. They want support and understanding from their boss and other colleagues.

• More than just for moms. Working moms don’t want to feel singled out. When men talk about their needs as working dads, it helps moms too.

Problem Statement: Workplaces aren’t designed to meet the needs of working moms, which affects their opportunities for leadership positions.

“43% of women scale back at work or leave their jobs after having a child. But this comes at a great cost for companies. Losing an executive employee costs a company up to 213% of their annual salary.”

Protoyping & Co-Creation

Research Question: How might we support companies to better support working parents?

Prototypes:

1. Working parent assessment: a short survey for working parents to rate their company in parent-friendliness and to describe their company’s available support. We first tested it in paper form and then created a digital version using Google Forms. 

2. Company assessment: a parent-friendliness assessment for employers that would give companies a score based on the support they provide for working parents. We created a digital version using Interact as well as a paper version.

3. HR Platform: an online platform similar to Paycom or Justworks but for family benefits. We created wireframes for an employer facing element where they could see all the types of support they should consider for working parents, and an employee facing element where they can access all their policies and benefits.

Activities: One-on-one user testing sessions with key stakeholders and co-creation workshops with groups of stakeholders to get feedback on concepts, design elements, visual aesthetic, terminology etc.

Key needs to address:

• Working moms need an approachable way to communicate their needs to their employer. 

• Working moms want companies to consider the needs of all working parents.

• Companies need data to make informed decisions on how to better support working parents.

Final Intervention

Returnity is a data-driven service that includes an evaluation of current policies combined with employee feedback to provide a customized roadmap for building a parent-friendly workplace.

What do we mean by...

• a data-driven service? Combining a digital data-collection tool with in-person consulting 

• evaluation of current policies? Inviting employers to take inventory of the support they offer

• employee feedback? Hearing directly from working parents about their wants and needs

• a customized roadmap? Providing information and tools for companies to take action

Goal: to open up conversations so that companies take action towards becoming more parent-friendly.

Piloting

We piloted Returnity with 4 companies and 51 total partipants. These companies represented a range of industries, sizes, and levels of commitment to parent-friendliness.

Our pilot tests had two main objectives: 

• To understand if there is buy-in from both companies and working parents for Returnity

• To understand if our intervention is effective in achieving the outcomes that we have identified

Results

Returnity responds to a need for both companies and parents.

We had a 92% overall completion rate and scores ranged from 41-59 out of 100 possible points.

Returnity helps working parents to feel more supported by their companies.

“I feel deeply appreciative that my organization would choose to take this on, that makes me feel really supported.” - Emily, working mom

Returnity builds awareness and encourages companies to prioritize supporting working parents.

“I thought this would take a lot of time and money, but there’s actually simple things we can do right now.” - Sandra, HR professional

Returnity inspires companies to take action.

“A next step is to take inventory of our lactation spaces , since now I’ve realized that I don’t know if all our offices have one.” - Sherlyn, HR professional

*Download our process book below for our full Monitoring & Evaluation plan and additional data and outcomes showing the impact of Returnity.

Download the process book:

Watch our final presentation at the DSI Thesis Show:

Next Steps

Returnity was selected to participate in the SVA GroundFloor Incubator to explore the project as a business venture. We will continue pilot testing with additional companies to make improvements to the product and service, and begin to develop a business model. Our goals for the future include:

• Building a database: As more companies get involved, Returnity could become a tool for long-term data collection that provides information on how this is affecting women in leadership and overall industry trends.

• Creating a larger system: Evaluating a company’s parent-friendliness is just the first step, and we envision additional products and services we could offer to companies to help support them on their journey.

• Launching a movement: Our hope is that Returnity could create a movement of companies leading the way in thinking about the future of work and how the definition of family is changing.

Key Takeaways

• Building Trust: Since we aren’t working moms, building trust with our community was essential for the work to be rooted in their experiences.

• Listening and Staying Open: We learned not to over-plan our research and leave space for spontaneity. This allowed us to discover things we never would have expected and helped us challenge our own assumptions.

• Constraints Lead to More Creativity: We had to balance all the constraints of working mom’s schedules, needs, and realities, which helped us get more creative throughout our process.

• Monitoring and Evaluation: We quickly learned to begin our monitoring and evaluation at the beginning of the process to be able to establish a baseline and see change throughout.