Reflection – Mind Mapping

Challenge

I am a consultant in a corporate wellbeing consultancy firm. The wellness programs we work on have the  challenging task of improving productivity by improving employee mental and physical health while at the  same time reducing employee-related expenses (due, for example, to high turnover rates or excessive  absenteeism). One of my main clients, a global advertising and PR firm, dealt with a daunting statistic: 69%  of their worldwide, female employees who recently had a child resigned within the first year after giving  birth. This phenomenon had a negative impact on the company in terms of employee turnover and  reputation among potential new hires.

My team and I have been then hired to design and develop a welfare program specifically targeted at this  segment of the company population. Our goal was to reduce the number of resignations among new mothers  as well as providing them with all the tools to get the most out of their new, juggling role of working mothers  and improve their work-life balance.

Selection

My team and I gathered a massive amount of data through internal surveys and ethnographic interviews to  correctly address the challenge by getting to know working mothers’ needs and pain points. We then decided  to use the mind mapping tool because we needed to find patterns and meaningful insights from this data  that could be useful to design the welfare program.

Application

We booked a large meeting room for a whole morning and involved some of the employees already  interviewed/surveyed as well as some people from the client’s HR team to present the research’s first results.  The goal was to represent the mind of the employed working mothers with a visual map: their needs, their  struggles, their desires and aspirations regarding their career, their work-life-balance-related concerns. We  wanted to eventually come up with an action plan aimed at successfully meeting their instances by designing  the welfare program. We presented all the aggregated data emerging from the quantitative research as well  as the most interesting quotes from the individual interviews. We equipped each meeting attendant with a  notepad, pens, highlighters, markers and sticky notes and asked them to review all the material for one hour  without talking with other attendants. We then spent the next two hours comparing the participants' notes  and reflections, brainstorming to identify the main peculiarities and issues related to the concept of “working  mother” - which resulted into an extensive mind map. In the last hour we reviewed all the concepts and  connections emerged in the mind map and based on that, we discussed the possible solutions that the  company could implement to meet the employees’ needs.

Insight

Many associations – in different ways related to the concept of “working mother” - emerged from the  workshop exercise, but the main ones were the following:

  Guilt. No matter where they are, working mothers always feel like they should be elsewhere,  getting something productive done for their family or career. They experience a profound sense of  guilt for letting their team or boss down and, at the same time, feel like they’re not taking good  care of their children. It feels like a no-win situation, preventing them from fully being in the  moment whether at home or work, and fueling feelings of exhaustion and defeat that can lead  them to burnout.

  Overwhelm. Working mothers are chasing the balance of working a job they want/need and being  the present mother they want to be. This delicate balance often leaves little to no room for self- care, including mental health improvement.

  Flexibility. Mothers need flexible work schedules to accommodate the demands of parenting. From  the survey, lack of flexible work emerged as the #1 cause that keeps mothers from staying in the  company’s workforce. Remote working (total or partial) and flexible working hours would be great  allies for their work-life balance.

  Support. Working mothers are aware that they don’t have to do everything on their own to be a  good mom, or a good employee. Robust benefits such as paid time off for taking care of their  families, paid maternity leave, employer-sponsored daycare for their children,  breastfeeding/pumping areas and other on-site amenities (concierge services, fitness and yoga  classes, free counseling/therapy sessions…) would be perceived as priceless perks for them.

Approach

People problems are business problems: employers need to be vigilant in making sure working mothers are  supported and their needs are met. Using the mind map as the design thinking tool of choice for this  workshop shifted the focus from data to possibilities, unleashing participants’ creativity and intuition. Data  points and research were still the starting point, but the creative, human-centered approach led to  unexpected and innovative solutions, and ultimately to design, test and launch a wellbeing program  specifically tailored for my client’s mother employees.

