Early intervention to navigate depression and anxiety among female leaders in consultancies.
UX research / Service design
How might we prevent high achieving female leaders from self-destructing in a highly competitive working environment?
In a super competitive hierarchical environment like consulting companies, female leaders are in the middle of all stakeholders in the ecosystem with structural factors that contribute to the complexity of the problem, which cause the overwhelming pressure to themselves.
The research shows that these female leaders are already doing unpaid emotional labor that put more weight on themselves. In the culture that normalise overworking, there is also internal need to be validated that is currently exploiting their physical and mental health significantly.
The common factors being…
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Measurement metrics
that reproduce the idea of toxic productivity.
👨💼
Seniors & Partners
who prioritise efficiency and calculable results.
👩💻
Junior consultants
who need professional and emotional supports from their leaders.
⏐ OUR PROCESS
⏐ DISCOVERY IN-DEPTH RESEARCH
Outlining our user research process, I proposed structured research plan and analysis frameworks that would support the team in our timely and access-limited discovery stage. We brought in different angles of mental health in general and contextual research that determined specific conditions of the industry and people we are designing for.
Components of good mental health.
Planning for user research, I created an analysis framework that helped breaking down elements of each conversation into categories. Plus a standardised discussion guide to assist our team’s representative during the interviews. Our expectations towards the process were to …
Understand a pattern of behaviours and values.
Identify unmet needs and its barriers.
Find leverage points.
⏐ PERSONA
A mixture of our female leaders consists of,
Common traits of … perfectionism, internalised self pressure, desired to be approved by others, strong ambitions for professional success.
Belief of … higher position, higher responsibilities.
Missing work-life balance … in compensation for career progress.
⏐ KEY INSIGHTS
01 Different levels of awareness, different leader styles.
Resulting in different interactions between female leaders and their colleagues, throughout the ability to express their feelings.
02 Different support systems available.
Varied from formal and informal circles, as a network of interactions based on dependable relationships.
03 Only hard work is measured and recognised.
Reflected from the current measurement metrics that only evaluate traditional forms of productivity and success, which affect employee of different levels including juniors and middle managers, who consequently receive doubled amount of pressure from both ends.
⏐ DESIGN DIRECTION
From our findings, we redirected and specified our challenge as …
How might we help female leaders increase their awareness and enable them to communicate effectively with their teams about mental health?
By focusing on 3 main levels,
Self : tackling internal need for validation
Ecosystem : System that explicitly and implicitly rewards hard work but devalues emotional labour
⏐ CONCEPT VALIDATION
Takeaways for further iterations …
Feasibility
Can it be embedded into existing/ familiar technological tools?
Data management and risks.
Desirability
Can the avatar feel more like a person instead of a robot?
Anonymity and data privacy.
Viability
Business model and cost-effectiveness, B2B subscription or internal built-in?
⏐ ITERATION
To respond to the most critical feedbacks we received which are team relationship and appropriate anonymity. We value transparency and genuine connections between team members and believe it could be an incremental element for our solution.
Key improvement :
Avatars will be visible for all members subject to a person’s consent to share their current avatar. Which could be leveraged into bias-free conversations between leaders - members or members - members, or signposting to other support services when necessary.
On a weekly basis, leaders receive prompts to navigate team and personal mental health status. ensuring their capability to operate in a productive and healthy way.
⏐ VALUE PROPOSITION
Personal reflections
“Mental health is one of the hardest issue to tackle, with its level of sensitiveness and complexity. In this project our team had a chance to break it down and identify areas where our intervention could create the most sustainable and transformative impact for the industry, it was challenging but absolutely worth the effort“
Feedback from Alvarez & Marsal female leaders