Mind Mapping

Challenge

My consulting teammates and I, specialized in analyzing business concerns and finding the best solutions  for their problems, were assigned to a project which consisted on investigating which are the key issues  that determine the well-being of the employees in the auditing department of a multinational company,  with the aim of pursuing the increase of level of happiness among the workforce environment.

The reason why we were asked to carry out this research is because the department to investigate is  recently reporting high employee stress and unsatisfaction, after suffering heavy work waves with  numerous demands concerning firm auditing after the break of the Covid-19 economic crisis. We have a  pretty short deadline to face this challenge, so we are thinking about testing all employees of the  department in one unique experiment.

Selection

Out of all design thinking tools that we could use in order to find an approach that shows us the way to  increase employee wellbeing, we have decided to use the mind mapping tool. This design thinking tool is  the most appropriate when the experiment aims at finding patterns in given data among the surveyed  people. What we want to extract with this method is a group of several personalities when thinking  about the key issues for corporate wellbeing, just as we saw in the MeYou Health Story in the Design  Thinking course.

Application

In order to apply the mind-mapping tool in an effective manner, we handed out to all employees a blank  piece of paper and told them to draw an eight-portion pizza. Each of these portions had to be filled in  with a factor that the participant considered mostly essential for his/her wellbeing among the auditing  department, out of eight factors we listed to them. This means that the employees had to write eight  factors on each of their pizzas but, in case of considering one of those elements more important than  others, that element could be written in more than one portion, according to how critical it is in  comparison to the rest. The eight factors the participants had to consider for their portions were: career  potential, salary, balance with personal life, vacation periods, training financed by the firm, transport  provision to go to the office and return to home, the provision of meal tickets and other benefits of  working at the company such as online shopping discounts.

After completing this task, the employees were ordered to gather in groups of six people and discuss  about why each of them had reached their conclusions about giving more importance to some factors  than others.

Insights

Once the whole process mentioned above was finished, we found out that there were interesting  results, as patterns of data existed among the selected elements. We concluded that there were  different types of employee preferences, as those that selected career potential also tended to choose  salary and training paid by the firm. These employees, therefore, could be classified as a first prototype  of worker, which are more worried about having a successful professional career, rather than other  benefits.

Another clear pattern was showed when observing that those who chose balance with personal life  tended to also select vacation periods and transport to go and return from the office. We could  conclude, therefore, that this type of employee worries mostly about having time to spend with their  family. Finally, there were people that selected a mix of these elements, mainly the four most chosen  factors: balance with personal life, salary, vacation periods and career potential. The elements that were  less considered among candidates were transport provision and other benefits such as shopping  discounts.

Approach

I believe that this tool was accurate for measuring what people consider important for their wellbeing in  their company, because it gave us different points of view since we drew conclusions concerning diverse  kinds of personalities. Despite this, another valid tool that could fit in this experiment is visualization,  where pictures of a successful manager or a happy family would be shown, in order to see which result  more attractive for the candidates and conclusions would be drawn by stating the factors determining  wellbeing mentioned before, representing the opposite order of the process explained above.

