Reimagining the employee experience at the Department of Home Affairs

Transcript

1. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 ANGIE GLANCE: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Angie and I work within the digital and technology team at Synergy Group, a specialist government consultancy based in Canberra. I want to speak about a case study and project we did at the department of home affairs recently to redesign and redevelop their internal HR site called My HR. My HR was launched in late 2016 by the people division at the department when it was still known as the Department of Immigration and border protection, an organisation of about 14,000 people. At the time, it was promoteded as the single source of HR truth said to be an intuitive and user friendly experience for everyone regardless of their role, vocation, their level, their location across the globe. The impetus to build this site was that the pressure - lot of pressure was being placed on costly and labour intensive HR support channels, help desk channels, email and phone and it was not uncommon to hear of people losing their lunch hours waiting on the phone to get a simple answer that could have been resolved on My HR or hearing people waiting 8 to 10 weeks to receive a response to a simple question so we came in and wanted to apply the Australian Government's digital service standards and user centre design approaches to solve the issue. So just a quick example and we're talking about information architecture here and site negativigation. One of the most popular searches on My HR is the page about overseas postings. Everyone wants to work abroad and see if they're eligible to apply. From the home page of the hold My HR site it should have taken four clicks from the home page to reach the overseas posting page like this. But when we put people in front of a computer and asked them to search for that page, this is what we found and this wasn't the worst. We observed up to 32 clicks for a search that should have taken 4. It also showed us the amount of back tracking people were doing, in this case on the page called career management which is a term that can mean everything and nothing at the same time so there were many issues on the site but tasummarise into three they were counterintuitive site navigation and poor information ac tecture, inadequate search function and HR centric terminology. Starting with site navigation, we picked the 10 most common searches around sick leave, changing reporting lines, common HR inquiries and recruited 75 volunteers users across Berlin to Manila, Fremantle to Brisbane, people who represented grad cohorts, people working on K- class patrol vessels, legal officers,ops are, policy officers, and on average we saw 33% success across the 10 scenarios and the search Wozniacki excessive as well. The most outstanding exchs were overseas post andgz work station assessments and I'll show you the results are at the ends. Arern n terms of search and user behaviours, I'm sure people can attest they hear of volunteer users talking of expectations they have when they come into the work place. They expect to see similar things they see on digital devices and websites in their personal time and that could be in the form of central navigation menus, the time of language, the type of rich media they see on websites and the way they search. On My HR, people were searching like Google and typing whole sentences. In this case, "How do I apply for overseas posting," and they weren't getting the results they wanted. HR centric terminology. It was promoted by people division as a intuitive and user friendly experience and said to be made by HR practitioners with the end user in mind but reality was it was built by HR
2. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 2 of 3 practitioners for HR practitioners and this is evident in the language used throughout the site and title of pages. The example we come back to is about restriction allowance. Restriction allowance means you're sitting at home waiting by the phone and could get called in to work. To most people that means being on stand-by but no-one understood what that meant so when we asked people - when we told people what it meant we asked them to rename the page and every volunteer said that's stand-by allowance. By the end of the project, every page are to be reviewed and rewritten. So what we did to over come these issues, so goingback to the old My HR site, the entire information architecture was built around two groups so it would be either Manage Myself or manage My Team. At the time the people division felt there would be distinct HR themes that would fit into one of those two categories but the truth is regardless of whether you're an employee or manager you still need to know about pay, leave and conditions, you need to know about work health and safety and duplicating that across the website obviously confused staff and created in the words of one user a very jarring experience moving between the manage myself and manage my team subsections of the site. So we decided to adapt the traditional customer journey to what we call the employee pathway. The logic was every employee regardless of role, level, location would have to go through specific stages of their career or milestones at the department. Everyone would apply for a job, everyone needs to have a first day, everyone needs to know about their roles and responsibilities, hopefully everyone will think about professional development and eventually exit the organisation. We built the information ac tecture around employee pathway notice there are things like pay, leave and conditions, WH and S which will if dure across the pathways so we made sure they were vic on the sticky mega menu but the site was built around employee pathway. We heard from users the old site was bland, text heavy and not visual enough so we introduced My HR characters. My HR characters represented the diversity of the workforce. In choosing the characters, we basically gave our volunteers a photo album of characters and asked them to select the top half durzen they felt resonated best with them and represented the diversity of their team. Once we had landed on 10 to 12 characters we scattered them throughout the website through videos, through pictures and designated certain characters to particular stages of the pathway for example one of our characters Malcolm who was associated with exiting the department, you would see Malcolm's smiling face in all the videos and pictures in the exit section of the website. So the results. We were quite astounded when we launched the beta site the search navigation, the site navigation results. On average, success rose from 20 to 80% so overseas postings and work station assessments, 40% success to 100% success. It was also most evident in the user navigation pathways and the slide speaks for itself. We also know that users were three times more likely to engage in the content on the site and feedback we received was due to the characters and the more seamless experience they were getting through the employee pathway.
3. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 3 of 3 If I were to summarise this project, I think the key learning for all of us was that we often think about the Australian government's digital service standard as being applied to improving services for citizens and customers but it can also be used to great effect in improving internal services for staff and supporting a more engaged and productive workforce. Thank you very much. (Applause)