Challenge

Bringing a life to this world is one of the more beautiful gifts that nature has bestowed to women.  Childbirth is also a life-changing event as both the body and the mind undergo drastic transformations in  this period.

Unfortunately, in a lot of cases we see women dropping out of their careers during the period of  pregnancy as they need to juggle between a lot of stuff; some even undergoing complications that  demand special care. This in turn hampers the gender diversity of the workplace. A little bit of care from  the employers can go a long way in making this period a better one for our women employees and  encourage them to pursue their careers during and post this period.

One of the challenges that we faced in our organization was providing better care for our women  employees in this period. Apart from common and generalized understanding of what a woman needs  during this period, we did not have insights about the needs of our women employees as it relates to  our work environments. A team was set up to conduct an ethnographic research and one of the major  points they highlighted was the trouble with commute that was faced during this period. It was by far  one of the biggest reasons for them to quit their job.

One of the popular ideas that was generated was to provide cab facility for these employees to and from  their respective homes (what wows?). Considering the economies of scale, it was deemed feasible to  provide this facility for the last trimester (what works?) as it would relieve them of the stressful  commute and allied precautionary measures (what wows?).

Selection

We decided to conduct a learning launch with the existing employees with this condition by offering  them the cab service. We had an exploratory mindset and were keen to find out the way this benefit  was received and what iterations should this go through to solve the challenge for our folks. We set up a  procedure to collect weekly feedback about the use of this service from the users, with a particular  focus to any subjective feedback and suggestions coming our way.

Application

The home pick and drop service was offered to all women employees who were on the family way and  they had reported it formally to the organization. A mail was sent to all of them initiating this benefit.  Additionally, they were briefed by their managers and colleagues from human resources about the

usage of this benefit during their last trimester. Managers of these employees connected with them on  weekly basis and checked on the quality of the services and whether the employees found this useful. A  2-questions survey was also rolled out to make the usage friendlier. The survey had the following  questions:

  How would you describe the cab services that is being provided to you?

  In which ways could this service be more beneficial to you?

Insight:

There were quite a few insights generated from the discussions and the responses of the survey:

Cabs should report 10 minutes prior to the journey start time as it could possibly take a little longer for  some of the women folks to come down from their home due to slow walking pace during that time

Cab drivers should be extra careful while crossing speed bumps/humps on the road as the sudden jerks  were better avoided. This meant the journey time would be longer; hence, the cab should report earlier  than scheduled

The other great insight that we had, but not from the surveys and the discussions, was from the set of  employees who were in the family way but not in the last trimester. Considering certain medical  conditions from some, they wanted to utilize the facility in the other trimesters and not the last one.

We considered the feedback and conducted a training program for all our cab drivers emphasizing best  practices while pregnant women are on commute. Additionally, we made the service available for 3  months anytime during the pregnancy period.

Approach

The next time we do it, I would go deeper with my ethnographic research. I would have focused on not  only the kind of solution that could resolve the challenge, but also on the factors that are critical to  quality for the users. This will help understand the variables that we should be mindful of including in  the solution that will create that ‘wow’ factor for the users.

In the context of this specific case, we had drawn insights about the challenges our women employees  face to commute to work during their pregnancy. I would have also used the ‘visualization’ tool in  addition to the interview that I had done. The visualization would have helped my users articulate how  they see themselves during that commute and it would have generated a tangible picture for me. I could  have included those elements in the learning launch itself creating more delight in the very first  iteration.

