Employee Experience: BYU Marriott Business Career Center

Client:

BYU Marriott Business Career Center

Project Duration:

7 Months

Project Deliverables:

Final Impact Presentation

Project Overview

This was a project I completed while working as a Client Success Specialist at the BYU Marriott Business Career Center (BCC).

The goal of this project was to improve the average BCC employee’s experience after interviewing employees and creating experience maps by implementing new programs to target points of the employee experience that can be improved.

This project included 4 stages:

  1. Interviewing team members
  2. Creating experience maps and ideating new programs
  3. Implementing the new programs
  4. Collecting feedback to analyze the impact of the project

Process

After interviewing at least 30% of each team (Client Success Specialists, Marketing, Data Analysts, Senior Managers), I created the following experience map outlining the “BCC experience” as told to me through their interviews. I found people shared their BCC experience from two perspectives, one being a seasonal perspective of moving through the different BCC time periods, and the other a hierarchical experience, telling the experience through various promotions and roles.

Through the interviews, I found the following pain points:

  • Lack of friends in the beginning, seeing the strong connections around you and not feeling part of it
  • Mentorship gone after training, not consistent once semester switches
  • Lack of expectations during training with company work and training
  • Non CSS Companies teams feeling left out of trainings
  • PDP season not as motivating or fulfilling
  • Not as much urgency end of fall/winter semester
  • SCRUM not fulfilling the same purpose virtually
  • The BCC community has been weakened due to virtual circumstances

I ideated a list of potential programs to help alleviate these pain points:

  • Shift-wide guided reflection time once a week (Friday recess)
  • Weekly challenges for building community (Reverse SCRUM)
  • Mentorship “buddy program” not necessarily ordered by seniority
  • Using time reporting in Sr. Manager’s walking meeting, using shift leads to also look at time reporting and comment back to the individuals.
  • Using droplets for more positive affirmations from Sr management, making droplets more of a focus. 
  • Trainee introduction video to be posted in GroupMe

I decided to implement the first two program ideas on the above list: Shift-wide guided reflection time during Friday recess and weekly challenges for building community during our Reverse SCRUM.

Shift-wide Guided Reflection Time (Friday Recess)

When working remotely at the BCC, during each shift there is a 15 minute “Recess” period, where team members can join a zoom call to socialize for a brief break from their shifts. This program targeted the pain point of team members not feeling connected to their co-workers.

At the BCC, there is a “theme of the week”, which is a theme our supervisor gives the team to focus on and think about while completing their workload. For this program, I decided I would further utilize the theme of the week and create a “recess prompt” to use during the last recess of the week to encourage team members to come and have a meaningful yet fun discussion involving the weekly theme.

I decided to run this program for 4 weeks with the following themes and recess prompts:

  • Weekly Theme: Clifton Strengthsfinder
    • Recess Prompt: Talents tend to be lifelong, something that is natural to you. Go around and share a story from your childhood that showcases one of your strengths, then talk about how you have seen that grow from a talent to a strength as you have matured.
  • Weekly Theme: Proactive Curiosity
    • Recess Prompt: Engage your curiosity through some “would you rather” questions! Go through this list of would you rather questions and answer them beyond just saying which one you would rather do. Think about alternative scenarios, give your reasoning, question why other people chose the way they did, and make your own questions, be curious and have fun!
  • Weekly Theme: Accountability Partners
    • Recess Prompt: A shift is nothing if not a big group of accountability partners. This week, get to know each other and your strengths better by coming ready to talk about the “best of us” and how we can help each other out as a shift.
  • Weekly Theme: Clifton Strengthsfinder
    • Recess Prompt: This week’s theme is Strengthsfinder, and strengths are nothing if not our own personal superpowers! During recess you will be talking about superheros and super powers. Who is your favorite superhero? What superpower would you have? How do those two things relate to your strengths and how might you incorporate parts of that into your daily life?

Weekly Challenges for Building Community (Reverse SCRUM)

At the BCC, every shift is bookended with two different meetings, SCRUM and Reverse SCRUM. The first is meant to communicate priorities and project updates at the beginning of the shift, and the second is to communicate any roadblocks or anything that happened out of the workflow during the day.

One of the pain points was the feeling that Reverse SCRUM was not completing the same purpose as it did in person, as there was simple nothing to report from anyone and it was a waste of 3 minutes at the end of the shift. In order to make this meeting meaningful, I created prompts to answer in the meeting to make the time spent on the call worthwhile.

  • Mondays through Thursdays, one team member would be assigned to share something they learned that week, or a helpful tip for using any of our software.
  • On Fridays, each team member would say something they were proud of that week, or something they did to help them remember the theme of the week.

Project Impact

Shift-wide Guided Reflection Time (Friday Recess)

  • 30 participants participated in the initial survey, 18 participants participated in the follow-up survey. 61% of respondents had participated in at least one recess prompt.
  • Reflection Time
    • The participants who do reflection time once a month decreased from 36.7% to 33.3%
    • The participants who do reflection time every week increased from 10% to 11.1%
  • Initially, 11 participants felt their reflection time was a 6 or below on a scale from 1-10 regarding effectiveness, in the second survey only 3 participants felt their reflection time was a 6 or below. (effectiveness of 7 or above went from 63% to 83%)
  • There were no clear favorite of prompts, each one was mentioned in responses.

Survey Comments

  • “Sometimes it was difficult to get a decent turnout, but the more people there were the better it was!”
  • “I thought the prompts were good! The only thing is I sometimes struggle coming up with answers to the prompts on the spot”
  • “I actually really liked them! It was a simple team bonding activity that helped us get closer to each other.”
  • “Wish they had been other days besides just Friday”
  • “I liked the creatively themed recesses!”

Weekly Challenges for Building Community (Reverse SCRUM)

  • There was a total of 20 responses
  • 25% felt that tribal knowledge was “very effective”, 60% felt it was “moderately effective”, and 15% felt it was “not effective”
  • For the Friday Reverse Scrum prompt, 65% felt it was a positive addition, 30% felt it was neither a positive nor negative addition, and one person felt it was a negative addition. 

Survey Comments

  • “It helps me with reminders and keeping up on things”
  • “I like the idea of having team members share a goal they set for themselves during Monday Scrum and then reviewing it at the end of the week.”
  • Other: Been helpful, but it would be nice to post them in the Ops channel afterwards, hard to get participation and feels forced, prompts would be nice (teams, workflow, etc), makes reverse scrum longer than it needs to be, great to hear tips and tricks, very useful for new hires. 
  • “I like focusing on the theme of the week, it keeps us unified”
  • “I just love the chance to celebrate one another”
  • Good to hear from others, and brag about yourself!
  • “Gives me a constant appreciation for others”
  • “Encourages active communication and reflection between team members”
  • Other: Takes a lot of time, people feel included, hard to remember what was said week to week, helps me to recognize the good I have done, some people don’t want to share these things and it “wastes” end of shift time. 

Overall Impact

  • According to the survey results, the majority of employees enjoyed the recess prompts and reverse scrum changes. 
  • These programs allowed for team members to build and maintain relationships.
  • A focus on the theme of the week during recess and reverse scrum was helpful for many BCC employees. 

My Takeaways

  • I was able to get to know my team members better as I interviewed them and participated in the recess and reverse scrum prompts
  • If I were to do this again, I would change the metrics I measured, focusing more on team relationships and the effectiveness of the meetings. 
  • The theme of the week can be a powerful unifying factor when we actively try to incorporate it into our work days. 
  • People like direction, so having themes and prompts are good to help people connect and share valuable insights and information.