Book your leave
An improved employee experience through better tooling
This new app addressed a classic business problem of projected numbers of employees time off being inaccurate. These miscalculations affected the monthly billing rate, as well as accounts and revenue reporting. When looking why these numbers were off, we discovered people did not book their leave appropriately due to various user experience challenges.
Client Internal tooling
Role Lead Product Designer
Team 1 Engineer and myself
Time Side of desk - 5 months, 20021-2022
Key results
A better way of booking leave was proposed which would have resulted in
• Accurate forecasting of leave time
• Improved employee experience for staff
• Improved employee experience for managers
Impact
As this use case demonstrates, the impact of employee experience goes beyond just the emotional satisfaction of having easy tools, but it affects the bottom line and business operations and reporting – accumulating in data and information inaccuracies, which all affect the business’ health. UX can make this difference.
Learnings
While we were able to learn how to get the right data and systems to talk to each other, the biggest learning was that it wasn’t individual intent not to book leave. But had they be given better tools and clearer information, they would have happily abided by policies and code of conduct.
Business context
Every end of the holiday year (close to August) help desk tickets would soar because people were trying to understand how much leave they had left. Leave data was exported from the Time and Expense management system that exported a very basic mono print report slip or available hours to take as leave. As a result staff got served with raw operational data in an email attachment that was not easily legible.
Product context
Staff did not have an easy way to see their days or hours of remaining leave. The latest record of leave allowance would be delivered as an email attachment but only every 14 days. Hence, staff would take leave or be absent without booking leave.
User context
The email attachment was not easy to understand. The time left from the allocated annual leave or PTO (personal time off) balance, was reported in hours, not days. But also the PTO booking had to be done through Workday - which was an external system step needed to interface with. Leave data was only updated every 2 weeks.
Design process: task flow mapping
The engineer and I used a range of methods to evidence our hypothesis. We interviewed users, we spoke with the IT help desk, we retrieved data from the ticket system for request on PTO data raised. We looked at the data structures and started sketching out a new future version, focusing on what would a good future look like?
Journey optimisation
We tested and iterated over our design and build and we demonstrated our new app to staff and senior stakeholders to show the difference it would make to book leave: Employees could see their remaining leave with 2 steps, and could book time off with 4 interaction steps. The manager could approve with 2.
Results
At the time of concluding this project, latest estimates the help desk still answers over 1000 tickets per day pertaining remaining leave hours.
