Recognition &Â Rewards Design Sprint
🧢 Role: Facilitator, Project Manager
🧠Demonstrated Skills: Design Thinking, Facilitation, Leadership, Analysis, Collaboration, Mentorship
⏳ Duration: 2 weeks
This case study has been adapted to fit a digital audience. Digital artifacts have been created to demonstrate real-world activities.
Overview
Zebra Technologies offers a wide range of hardware and software solutions that empower frontline workers in a variety of industries, including Retail, Healthcare, Transportation & Logistics, and more. After a series of strategic acquisitions, the company was in a position to reevaluate their software portfolio from the ground-up to consolidate or integrate resources in effort to bring new solutions forward that can empower the frontline worker.
The goal of this design sprint was to discover relationships between various platform drivers across different business units that can reward and empower frontline workers. It was also imperative to design an effective and engaging sprint that didn’t exhaust my team by the end of it
My Contributions
I designed the content and schedule for a 2-day sprint for my team to assess Zebra’s software portfolio of 100+ products for opportunistic reward drivers across business units.
Business Outcomes
•  Identified 24 new opportunities for integrations between existing products
•  Created reusable workshop guideline and materials for team to continue expanding ideas
•  Outcomes of this design sprint directly informed ongoing partnership with Axonify
•  Proved effectiveness of <5 day design sprints, saving team time and resources
Preparation
How it began: Tufts University Partnership
Every semester, our team partners with universities offering mentorship throughout a capstone project. During one particular semester, I mentored a group of students at Tufts University to build out a rewards and recognition platform. Typically these student engagements ended with the semester, but I wanted to take this work back into Zebra and continue building off of it. They laid the foundation of what defines a “good” reward in the workplace; offering different modalities on how to obtain these rewards and raising questions around the ethics of reward distribution.
Designing an engaging workshop
Our team regularly does design sprints, while they can be really fun and explosive opportunities for engagement, they often come with caveats -- too much time taken away from other work responsibilities, days drag on, indistinguishable efforts between digital and physical work. Taking consideration of the team’s collective feedback, these are some of the mindful considerations I planned for:
Testing activities beforehand helps give accurate and adequate time blocks for activities.
Build awareness of how much cognitive load you are putting on the participants.
Participants are looking to detach from their screens - plan for fewer presentations and more activities!
Provide energizing meals and snacks. You don’t want to put your team in a food coma.
(For context... deep dish pizza was served at a prior design sprint)
Execution
Generating content and activities
Breaking down the overall objective of this workshop highlighted 3 major areas we needed to breakdown.
I designed an activity for each of the following areas of interest. Throughout the following activities, the team should be able to (1) identify the drivers in a platform, (2) identify relationships or areas of integration between two different platform’s drivers, and (3) align each instance back to a qualifying reward.
Drivers
Drivers are incentivized actions within a platform. By understanding a platform’s persona and KPI’s, we can identify a driver that can be rewarded.
Participants were given a solution map and platform descriptions to read through. They then rotated around the different business units, and were asked to brainstorm for driver ideas which they then wrote on a color corresponding sticky note and place it on the diagram.
Relationships
We wanted to uncover how different platforms can integrate with one another - by drawing connections and associations between platforms, these new relationships can become additional reward drivers.
Participants were paired up with other participants that typically worked in an entirely different business unit. The pairs were asked to draw connections between two or more different colored sticky notes and brainstorm on how they might integrate with one another. Afterwards, they filled out a formula by mapping their idea onto a chart.
Rewards
As shared in the Tufts University findings, we can identify whether a driver can be classified as an effective reward for a frontline worker if it aligns with our principles on what defines a reward.
By taking the formulas that were mapped in the previous activity, participants were asked to create lightning demos of each integration proposal and define the reward driver, reward type, and identifying any areas for ethical concern that could arise in a work environment.
Effective Scheduling: Classifying activities
After the separate activities were outlined, I classified them as either low or high cognitive load activities. This helped determine when we would schedule breaks, include a primer activity, switch to a game, or end the day altogether. I also asked other colleagues that would not be participating in this workshop to test the activities to get a sense of how much time to schedule.
As much as I could hypothetically prepare this workshop with print materials and outlines, I ended up creating an entire version of the design sprint on a Miro board to help visualize what was going on in each activity - understanding exactly what data was being captured and how, as well as the movement between activities. Creating this board allowed other remote designers to participate or follow-along and also served as an easy tool to document and synthesize the results from the workshop.
Takeaways
Documentation & synthesizing information real-time helps a lot.
I’ve been in so many design sprints where we were asked to categorize the results from a brainstorm. While it is a valuable activity, this was not the focus of my objective and we didn’t have a lot of time. During breaks, I would make sure to capture what was on the in-person board into the Miro board so I could (1) document it for later use and (2) quickly categorize the findings and present them back before the next activity. This helped the team draw more insights without taking away their capacity for the next brainstorm.
Be flexible with your agenda
Throughout the workshop, I found our team diving into valuable discussions (that I totally wish could have been recorded!) - while they inevitably delayed our schedule, I wasn’t married to it and allowed the collaboration to naturally flow. Participants were encouraged to take additional time to ask posing questions, ponder ideas, explore a sub-topic. We don’t often get to work this closely together in-person.
Take breaks... and extend your breaks if needed!
Burnout can happen real fast when you’re purging out brainstorm after brainstorm. By mid-day it was evident that the team was getting tired. We extended lunch time and played an extra game to recharge before getting back into it.