One of Amazon’s key Leadership Principle is Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer. As part of helping creating a collaborative workplace environment, the Amazon PXT team (People Experience and Technology) wanted to create an employee engagement platform called Shout-Outs for corporate employees to foster recognition, and encourage meaningful commendation for work and personal milestones.
MY ROLE
Responsible for collaborating with UXR, end-to-end design and leading stakeholder/leadership reviews. I was lead UX designer for the sending a Shout-Out, and integrations with Slack and Chime.
COLLABORATIVE TEAM
2 Product Leads, 7 Engineers, 1 Solo Designer, 1 shared UX Researcher, 1 Copywriter
TIMELINE
September 2022 to August 2023. To be rolled out in November 2023 in the USA and Canada.
Due to the impact Shout-Outs had in the associate experience*, our parent org adopted the goal to expand the product to all salaried employees in order to improve employee sentiment and drive connection across salaried employees and intended to replace all current recognition platforms (Accolades and Celebrate) to become the go-to product for all things recognition and celebrations at Amazon .
*Improved job satisfaction (+3.8%), feelings of recognition (+2.1%), feelings of connectedness (+2%), sense of accomplishment (+1.2%), feelings of being valued (+1%), and overall sentiment (+1.9%)
Shout-Outs aims to make employee recognition a natural part of Amazon culture by integrating into Amazonians’ current ways of working, with the goal of improving employee sentiment and feelings of belonging and appreciation.
- Create the seamless and frictionless experience to start and send a Shout-Out
- Define areas of integration apart from the the native and web experience
- Slack integrations
- Chime integrations
Own and execute UXR along with research partner
- Validation of hypothesis by documenting a 6-pager
- Conducts user interviews and moderate usability sessions
Design the send flow for both native and web experience
- Mid-fi to hi-fidelity designs
- Own design review sessions
Own copy and localisation to 12 languages
for all parts of the experience, and also notifications (email, push and bell icon)
Own alignment and lead review sessions with
Leadership, Product and Engineering
Goal: Identify current recognition experience (online and offline), identify gaps and improvements, validate the assumption that formal recognition is important to an employee
What do we want to achieve?
- Understand how salaried employees experience recognition currently. Identify gaps as well as best practices.
- Understand what would be a meaningful change to salaried employees workplace environment in terms of recognition?
- Determine interaction with other tools and understand if there is a desire to integrate recognition in other tools
- Determine where and why salaried employees are looking towards 3rd party tools and how we might fill the gap.
Assumptions we want to prove/disprove
- Could notifications be distracting/Too many notifications about recognition can be distracting
- Amazonians want to be able to send and receive recognition without always having to go to a separate site to do it
- Recognition is important to Amazonians but they forget to send it
- “Formal” recognition (submitted through Accolades Shout-Outs/etc) can be more meaningful than a Slack message or verbal recognition
- Some Amazonians prefer to only have private recognition
The validation was split into two stages, qualitative interviews; where insights were fed into the quantitate survey.
We conducted 14 user interviews across various levels of seniority, demographics and teams across Amazon. We learnt that,
- Users love public recognition and most common recognition is via email, slack and stand up
- User feel Manager recognition is more important than a peer recognition
- Users are largely ok with receiving automated recognition for work related milestones
The survey was sent to all of Amazon corporate and salaried employees across the globe. 30,347 people responded and some of the key learnings were,
- 81.28% consider Manager recognition important or very important
- 58.35% consider Peer recognition important or very important
The survey was elaborate and some of the analysis is represented below,
What kind of work-related recognition would you like to get from your peers or managers?
What kind of work-related recognition would you like to get from your peers or managers? (Open text responses)
The learnings from user interviews and survey validated some of the assumptions and also showed us how people perceive recognition. Some of learnings we wanted to inplement,
- How might we increase Manager engagement and create a seamless experience for managers to identify and recognize employees
- What could be some pins which are specific to salaried and corp employees which is most meaningful to them
- What are some of the automated pins we might want to carry for MLP without giving the sense of the recognition being robotic
- Overall how can the experience be fun and engaging and not tied to performance
As we began to think about how Shout-Outs can now expand to the larger corporate group, there were still some challenges and risks which needed to be answered for.
- Inequitable Experiences: Associate vs Salaried (e.g., free-text, commenting and public recognition). Mitigation through parity with existing tools.
- Inappropriate messaging: Risk due to customizable text. Mitigation through reporting feature.
- Fuelling favouritism/discrimination: Any type of recognition tool comes with a risk of bias. Mitigation by providing nudges to managers to send an equitable amount of messages to their direct reports.
- Privacy: What if some employees do not want to be publicly recognized? Mitigation by providing opt-out and marking recognition as private.
Though there was an existing flow for sending a Shout-Out, this changed fundamentally for Salaried corporate employees. This included key additions to the flow such as,
- Searching for and adding peers based on circle of influence, closeness to a team or reporting structure
- Adding open text and risks associated with it
- Allowing users to mark a recognition as private
- Allowing user to opt-out
I conducted moderated usability test along with our UXR partner to understand if users were able to achieve the goal of,
- Identifying how to start sending a Shout-Out
- Ability to add peers, choose appropriate pins, add message
- Edit previous steps
- Successfully send the recognition and interact with the card in the feed
I am responsible for writing the first pass of the copy, but final copy is discussed with a copy writer before finalising. Amazon is Born Accessible, meaning all of our designs are accessible at launch. For this we have an extensive process where I mark down all the labels, tab orders with our internal markdown system. No design is handed to the devs without completing this step.
How do we define success?
Product Engagement:
The initial goal for monthly product engagement is 40%, in parity with engagement rate for the Shout-Outs for Associate experience.
Employee Sentiment:
Use of internal survey tools to identify themes such as job satisfaction and feeling of connectedness.
