How to we create a culture of deeper trust between employers and workers

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How to we create a culture of deeper trust between employers and workers 〰️

Overview

Sojourner Manage* is an SaaS which is designed to enable early access to wages and greater control over manpower.

*A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) was achieved in 3 weeks and is a work-in-progress for future development & integrations.

This case study was part of a client project at UXD35, General Assembly

Role

UX Lead, Generalist UI/UX Designer

UX Design, Product Strategy, Business Innovation, UX Research & User Testing, Visual Design & Prototyping, Pitching

8-29 April 2022

BACKGROUND

Sojourner Brother is a social enterprise that is determined to help employers hire, manage, and care for their *migrant workers(MW) through easy-to-use technology. It hopes to ensure every migrant worker in Singapore are not victims to unfair employment practices and agent fees. In order to achieve those objectives, Sojourner Brother has 3 business pillars:

  1. Sojo Hire: facilitates the employment of workers for employers with zero agent fees.

  2. Sojo Manage**: helps employers and workers improve their cashflow through early financing of earned wages for workers.

  3. Sojo Health: offers a Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL) financing for workers to access healthcare treatment.

*I will be using MW, workers, or migrant workers interchangeably in this case study.

**Sojo Manage has been renamed to Sojo Salary, as reflected on Sojourner Brother’s website as of 25 July 2022.

Early Discussions

Our client Joshua wants to foster a culture of deeper trust and transparency among Employers and Migrant Workers. We were tasked to validate the following:

The Problem

How do we incentivise employers and workers to adopt a digital solution amidst conflicting interests?

Discover

Design Process

Define

Develop

Discover the current landscape

What is Sojourner Brother’s Unique Selling Point

Deliver

Our landscape research revealed that the challenges facing the construction industry were multi-faceted and complex. As such we wanted to discover what differentiated Joshua’s services from other players on the scene.

We then proceeded to uncover more insights from employers and workers to understand their pain points

Uncovering pain points

Emerging Research Themes

Through the extensive sessions of research, 6 prominent themes emerged. It is clear that introducing digital tools would be helpful to reduce financial burden, and create greater clarity of manpower and resources.

Solution Exploration

It should be noted that the Attendance Tracking Tool was a scaled down version of the original Work Manager Tool. As such, I did not display wireframes and user flow (for employers) due to its irrelevance.

[The Work Manager was used for Usability Testing (UT) and was scaled down to an Attendance Tracking Tool post-UT]

Design studio and Wireframing

Design Studio

Visualising our interactions for employers and MW

START

Adopting a digital transformation, building a culture of trust and transparency

Final Solution

Migrant Workers may have concerns like “Am I signing in to the right workplace”. Their fears of “losing out on their wages” will influence their interaction with Sojourner Manage. We ensured the visuals and information hierarchy were aligned to what they had anticipated (e.g. 2 entry points to sign in their attendance: click "‘Attendance’ or ‘Project’ cards.

Design Principle

Affordance

Offering HR support for finances and attendance tracking, improving cash flow and workplace satisfaction

We envisioned an SaaS which would be used concurrently by Employers and Migrant Workers. Moreover they would be using apps in less than ideal conditions at worksites. Hence the visual designs were synchronised on the Employer / Migrant Worker Interface, and had relatable images.

For future integrations, we have included cards for “Hire”, “Infohub“ and “Health“ to access the offerings of Sojourner Brother seamlessly.

Seamless

The Big Picture

The final solution for Sojourner Manage includes 3 component: 1 mobile interface for Migrant Workers. 1 mobile + 1 web for employers

Though our usability testing with 4 employers and 5 migrant workers, we made some iterations. We aligned naming of buttons of attention to attendance tracking to the workers’ understanding - We renamed ‘check in’ to ‘sign in’. We also scaled down on the Work Manager Tool to focus on tracking attendance only as employers found no relevance for information on manpower deployment.

MW High-Fidelity Final Screens

Employer High-Fidelity Final Screens

1

SSOT Login

Proposed integration of logging in process across Sojourner Brother platforms and other applications. Since we wanted a seamless experience for workers, my team and I suggested to Joshua to consider using SSOT (Single Source of Truth) integration in the future. Workers already have other applications to log into for health and work related purposes (FWMOMCare and SG Work Pass).

Earned Wage Access (EWA)

2

After conducting landscape research with my teammates, we decided to implement the EWA model through a cloud-based infrastructure for Sojourner Brother (SB). It would be feasible when partner SMEs facilitate the wages of their workers to SB once a month, while SB manages the earned wages of workers *for their withdrawal

*After UT, we decided to impose a limit on the number of withdrawals each worker can make in a month. This was in consideration of the lack of financial prudence practised by some workers (by their own admission).

Categorised card (for withdrawal and wage)

Stepper-Progress

Following UT where workers clicked on their earned wage (e.g. SGD 900) instead of the withdraw button, we learnt to help workers draw the association between the concept of EWA and seeing the monetary numbers of their earned wages.

Workers can feel more at ease learning a new application and have confidence in submitting their request for EWA

Light blue card: for employers to approve workers’ request

Employers can now quickly approve their workers’ requests. The visually contrasting card at the top informs employers of the new requests from their workers for their approval.

3

Attendance Tracking Tool

Used currently for MVP, attendance tracking tool reduces administrative process for employers, but also builds accountability and transparency between employers and workers.

Future improvements will offer greater oversight of manpower for employers. Discussions with Joshua (Founder of Sojourner Brother) included geo-tagging, workers’ leave request - These would increase the flexibility and awareness of manpower deployment, which would be vital if SMEs were to upscale in operations.