Second Harvest Heartland: Service Design
TL;DR
A local nonprofit was looking for ways to operationalize equity work within their organization. Through discovery research, journey mapping, and organizational change strategy, my team and I were able to uncover barriers getting in the way of employee engagement and create a playbook and internal employee website to incorporate equity work into day-to-day operations.
Tools: Zoom, Figma, Miro, Google Suite
Deliverables:
Team: Anisa Osman, Mackenzie Leach, Cristhian Arias-Romero
Role: UX Strategist / Researcher
Methods: Comparative Analysis, Journey Mapping, Personas, Stakeholder Interviews, Systems Mapping, Organizational Change Framework, SME Interviews, Strategic Planning, Service Blueprints
The Problem
Today, 1 in 10 people in Minnesota experience food insecurity. Within that statistic are Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Indigenous Minnesotans who are at least twice as likely as white Minnesotans to experience food insecurity. Racial disparities like these are what are referred to as the hunger divide.
Last year, the organization committed $13.2M towards confronting and eliminating racial disparities in hunger while committing to applying a racial equity lens to their programs and elevating hunger divide work as a strategic priority.
Additionally, the organization hired the incredible Sook Jin Ong as the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Second Harvest. Appointed to the role a year ago, Sook Jin has helped facilitate the creation of new programs that focus on food equity and cultural relevance. But oftentimes these efforts require high-touch facilitated workshops, and as a team of one, she is looking for something more sustainable.
“The question I ask [as the Director of DEI] is how do I make sure that as we build the cultural competency in the organization so we can see how we can do our work better? Because of our size, there is a lot of opportunity to do this thoughtfully. ”
Our team was brought on to identify both pragmatic and aspirational ways for Second Harvest Heartland employees to pull in inspiration from the communities that they serve and turn their DEI learnings into direct action, operationalizing equity work at every level of the organization.
How might we make it easier for employees to take inspiration and turn it into creating a more equitable, inclusive workforce?
The Solution
After identifying the barriers that prevent employees from bringing more equity and inclusion work into their day-to-day, I utilized an existing organizational change framework to layout how the organization could transition from current to future state. In each phase of this framework, we developed concepts that could overcome the restraining forces of change, utilizing user stories to contextualize how each persona would experience each concept & considerations for how to apply these concepts to the organization. In addition, we prototyped a SharePoint website to provide an internal repository that would enhance employees employees’ access to information and tools to further grow in their DEI journey.
The Process
Understanding Current Barriers
We began by meeting with our stakeholder to understand her expectations, define what success might look like for this project, and understand what DEI work currently looks like at the organization. From there we jumped into you research mode to identify how other organizations, large and small, are approaching their diversity, equity, and inclusion work. I focused specifically on food systems and organizations. Collectively, we synthesized our learnings into key takeaways, ideas for inspiration, as well as noting “lessons learned” from other organizations. Two things I noticed that are working well for organizations are:
Community-led / community co-design strategies are more effective than those that remain internal-facing
Organizations that are successful at this work are the ones who have DEI as foundational to their strategic plan, not simply “one part” of it
Jumping into discovery research, the team divvyed up primary and secondary research, meeting with current employees at Second Harvest and looking into comparative organizations in the food equity space to see how they were approaching their DEI-awareness journey. Using Directed Storytelling, I focused on creating an interview script to understand where employees drew inspiration from, the current mechanisms for educating employees about equity in their work, and uncover barriers that get in the way of applying those learnings.
Emerging Insights
After speaking with ten employees from various levels of the organization, several themes emerged:
Uncovering Pain Points
I was also able to identify four key barriers that prevented employee’s from further engaging with DEI work in their role:
Time dedicated to deeper strategic DEI work is scarce because it’s trumped by the day-to-day emergencies.
Time and energy are barriers to doing the more systematic thinking around diversity, equity and inclusion. Post-Covid, people are overwhelmed and often get caught up fighting fires that come up day-to-day.
“A lot of the day to day stuff feels more urgent and pops up more quickly and demands immediate attention. I just feel like we've been drinking out of a firehose these last few years and it's not going to get any better next year, quite honestly.” -Research Participant
Day-to-day routine and current job responsibilities don’t necessarily include a DEI component and can pull people away from the communities they serve.
When the community isn’t front and center, it can be easier to forget who the organization is trying to serve and the impact it has. Additionally, while many employees recognized that a shift is taking place around more thoughful DEI efforts, it is not yet viewed as an essential component for everyone’s role.
“It can be hard with food banks to see the diverse communities, [because] we sit behind a desk.” -Research Participant
Connecting the dots from DEI learnings into work-related actions is difficult.
Often times unmeasurable, applying new DEI learnings into day-to-day actions of employees can pose a challenge. If a direct correlation or application isn’t made in the moment, that information is more easily forgotten.
“I am sure I am better because of the DEI trainings I've had over time. But they end up being just trainings and workshops if they don't have an application in my day to day, and a fairly soon application” – Research Participant
Lack of defined goals and specifics around organizational direction made it difficult to articulate what DEI means for Second Harvest Heartland.
While many participants recognized a positive shift towards change and spoke highly about recent DEI efforts, some found it challenging to articulate how Second Harvest Heartland defines current and future DEI goals.
“I'm sure as an organization, we have some kind of DEI or inclusions statements. I am not totally familiar with it though, offhand.” - Research Participant
We also noticed that employees were at different phases of the DEI-awareness journey, so we created three personas to show how it is a spectrum, and considerations will need to be made based on who’s engaging with the solution.
Creating a Framework for Change
Transitioning from Second Harvest Heartland’s™ current state to an organization that has operationalized equity work in partnership with community will require a certain amount of organizational change. With this in mind, I began to research organizational change frameworks to ensure the changes will be sustainable.
I discovered the ADKAR® Model of Change, a widely used tool that helps analyze change and better understand how to do it. The five ADKAR elements —awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement— are the building blocks for creating change from a human-centered perspective.
In partnership with one of my teammates, we utilized the insights from the discovery research to build out the organizational and employee experience moving from current state to one that has operationalized equity work.
From the organizational view, I identified the biggest barriers that employees may face in developing awareness, desire, knowledge, ability reinforcement of the need to adopt more DEI practices into their work. I also provided ideas of how to overcome those barriers.
Zooming in on the employee experience, we broke down the ADKAR process and highlighted steps, goals, employee touchpoints, and ideas to solve for the current pain points.
Taking the ADKAR process a step further, we ideated around each phase of the process, generating over 100 ideas on how to build awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement around DEI efforts within the organization. These ideas were then grouped by theme, re-written, and tested with employees at Second Harvest Heartland.
Identifying Possible Solutions
Based on our learnings, we prioritized five concepts in each ADKAR phase, sorted them by the pain points they solved, and utilized User Stories to describe the impact each of the three personas, as well as considerations the organization should take when adopting each concept.
Building out an Internal Website
Building these ideas out further, I chose to focus on building out a new program that connected employees with the community while creating moments of reflection to apply learnings into their day to day.
Community Partnership Visits allows Second Harvest Heartland employees to take a paid day off to meet with community partners to listen and learn about the great work that they’re doing. Paired with an Agency Partner Specialist, these visits help build empathy and knowledge of who Second Harvest works with and how they're doing the work.
I built out a Service Blueprint to visualize the relationships between different service components—people, props, and processes—as it aligned to the touchpoints in an employee journey.
Because many touchpoints were digital-facing, I created an IA diagram and high-fidelity prototype for an employee-facing SharePoint site to help visualize some of the key aspects of the program.
The Next Steps
Based on early discussions with Second Harvest employees, many of the concepts show promise. Due to time constraints, we were unable to evaluate concepts beyond discovery research. We would recommend evaluating and co-creating concepts with employees to understand the impact on the specific communities the recommendations are trying to serve.
Possible paths forward:
Card Sort: Conduct card sorting exercise within each ADKAR element to prioritize which concept to build out first (questions could include: “What’s important? What stands out to you?” etc.)
Gauge Impact: Host a cross-functional group guide them through an “impact spectrum” exercise (i.e. physically write a spectrum from “not impactful” to “very impactful” on a whiteboard, focusing on one concept at a time, as each team member to rank each concept on its impact for themselves, for the organization, for the community, etc. Facilitate discussion on the rankings.)
Co-Creation Session: Once prioritized by impact, host a co-creation session with employees and community members to build out the concept further. Consider utilizing Service Blueprints to identify gaps in what designs need to be built