A tool to help companies have challenging conversations. Through short, UX friendly surveys we gauge employee pulse for organizations to address topics around mental health, race, covid amongst others
Inspiration: When Black Lives Matter regained a spotlight in the media, many companies felt the need to release externally facing press affirming their stance to reduce inequality. While organizations pledged resources and time to tackle these difficult problems, most did not address the topic in their own workplace. 77% of employees mentioned that their employer had not addressed or made an attempt at starting a conversation about Black Lives Matter in the workplace and over 91% of employees want to have this conversation. Work is not separate from the stress, pressures, motivators, and pleasures we have outside of work and Canded helps bridge the gap. We serve to work with organizations to have difficult conversations around mental health, social issues, and other topics that have been generally avoided in the workplace.
What it does: Our solution tackles two core problems. First, we aim to use data to drive decisions. We will leverage our platform to collect data from employees through iterative 1-3 minute surveys every week. Unlike conventional engagement surveys, we integrate a company’s goals and values into the questions. We created a natural language processing system on the back end to glean trends in responses that will help us provide recommendations. We also realized that the current competitive market does not offer customizable solutions, but rather broad recommendations. Canded, however, focuses on gathering data to create actionable recommendations that align with organizational objectives and employee sentiment. All employees at the firm would have access to a dashboard with anonymized results and recommendations to move forward.
How I built it: The survey was built standalone to offer a consolidated and consistent place for each employee to submit. Icons for the survey were illustrated through web illustration applications and we modeled the survey with the best elements of Mailchimp, Typeform, and Google Forms. The front end of the survey will be adjustable and linked to a specific company in order to give the company an opportunity to change questions for themselves. On the back end, there is a database which stores responses, and a Python algorithm that scrapes text to determine employee sentiment. The dashboard is built using Tableau that can be accessed by any user.
Challenges I ran into: The largest challenges are working remotely with a team and getting customer feedback. The virtual collaboration proved to be a challenge because every piece of communication needed to be as concise as possible. Ideating online though can prove to be challenging due to a lack of a whiteboard and other in person functionality. We also wanted to get user feedback every step of the way but we realized early on that finding virtual participants would be difficult. That being said, we were able to find users to test out the features, functionality and overall merits of the idea through personal connections and online polling.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of: Having a difficult conversation is challenging but admitting that it’s needed can be even more daunting. Our proudest accomplishment was talking to businesses who felt that they needed Canded because they were unsure of where to start. We are in final discussions with two different organizations to run a pilot test and have almost completed the final development for the product. Mostly, we have gotten great feedback from customers who mention that this is definitely a project that they would be interested in and need. We know that this project is high impact in today’s world but will continue to remain and become more important as companies become more comfortable with having difficult conversations.
What I learned: Through the process, we have learned a lot about customer empathy. While our idea is sound and the technology is feasible, we have to focus on the customer first. For example, most users prefer simple interfaces and are more likely to complete a survey if there are images. This helped adjust our product from a technically advanced mechanism to a simple survey. We also found that most people need to see actual changes that prompted our invention of a company’s “canded-ness” score.
What's next for Canded: We plan on working with our initial two organizations to build out a full functioning dashboard and a customized platform. After that, we are planning on using customer feedback to incorporate feedback and better build out the platform. This funding would help us reach that goal because we could invest in better customization technology that would serve well for individual businesses’ needs.
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