The Challenge for Enjoy

At times, it could seem that our leaders were not empathetic enough to our employees working in the field. Then we grew our legal team and they made it obvious that we needed to care 🙌. In addition, we had no ability to gather data around how long and how often people were taking breaks for.

Research: Validating Hypotheses

As the voice of the user, I took some time to learn from Experts directly.

1. Looking at Feedback: Using our Zendesk feedback feature for the Expert app, I was able to learn that Experts were having trouble setting aside time to take lunch breaks. This was because our Expert App  didn’t actually block their schedules for lunch like all the other activities. Seeing that about 10 people had shared feedback on this topic led to me set-up some research calls and ridealongs with some Experts. I wanted to get the experience first hand.

2. Talking to Experts directly: What I learned was that the challenge was not just lunch breaks. At times it was also hard to find time for breaks in between visits. Sometimes the time to drive to a bathroom location and park would already add more than 5 mins to the detour.

3. Going on Ridealongs: I decided to schedule multiple days of ridealongs within 2 weeks and focus on understanding how Experts managed their days and took breaks. Below are a few detailed stories that show the inconsistencies.

Conclusion

Taking breaks is an employee’s right but the quality and consistency of actually having the time to take a break varied Expert to Expert and day-to-day. The bigger problem for Enjoy as a company was that they were breaking labor laws by not being able to guarantee that employees could take breaks on EVERY shift they worked.

Iteration 1: A New System, A Whole New World

Early in 2020 we shifted to a new scheduling logic called ‘One Visit At a Time’ in which we assign Experts one visit at a time, (kind of like Uber and many other on demand services) This new system was not the solution to lunch breaks but an opportunity to create a solution. It was time to make sure Experts’ breaks were fully protected and non-skippable. No excuses.

A Solution with One Visit At A Time in Mind.

Saying ‘One Visit At a Time’ or OVAT really meant one ‘activity’ at a time. By understanding state by state labor laws our engineering team was able to create a logic that would assign a lunch break as an activity between the third and 5th hour of work.

Wireframes

I started by laying out a high level flow with wireframes to get feedback and approval from the product team before moving onto high res mocks. Stakeholders included our Head of Product, the Scheduling team Engineering manager and a Field Success representative.

Key Touchpoints & Functionalities:

1. Activity Served in schedule 

2. Redirecting to ADP for clock-out and clock-in 

3. 30 mins Timer 

4. Blocking access to work by removing navigation during lunch breaks.

High Res Mocks

First Iteration

A summary of what we learned from our first iteration:

1. Not having access to the navigation made Experts feel unsafe since the nav gave access to safety features.

2. Assigning the activity without a heads up felt disruptive.

3. By not giving visibility into the next visit many felt frustrated by the fact that they had driven the opposite direction to each lunch

Iteration 2: A higher Quality Break

From the feedback we received some key improvements involved:

1. working with the field success team to bring back the navigation to access safety features.

2. Adding a 10 min warning for Experts to finish tasks before lunch

3. Adding visibility into the next visit’s location.

Some additional improvements had to do with the overall re-design of the feed for OVAT and my push to make the Expert App feel a little bit less prescriptive in the UI and sprinkle in elements of delight.

Expanding on Breaks

Rest Breaks

10hr shifts require 2 additional 15 min breaks aside from a lunch break. Rest breaks are to comply with those legalities. The Expert has the option of postponing, but if the time window in which they required to take the break is coming to an end, the rest break will be served as a mandatory activity that cannot be postponed.

Take 5

Aside from the legally bound breaks, we know Experts also already take breaks between visits to use the bathroom, talk to their Mom, or simply take a breather. We want to provide a way to do this systematically as well in order. Ultimately, we must trust that Experts are doing their job and we must learn how this will impact the current business. If Experts are already taking these breaks as we hypothesize then we shouldn’t see a drop in completion or visits per day per expert.

What’s Next

We’re starting to provide a sense of control with the smaller breaks. I’m looking forward to analyzing the data and understanding when people are self-initiating breaks, for how long and often. Taking breaks shouldn't be so standardized because not everyone is ready to eat, or use the restroom at the same time so I keep wondering if we will be able to provide more flexibility for Experts. Another aspect of breaks I’m looking forward to working on is bettering our expectations for how 30 mins should be used. The expectation is that Experts start an activity right after the previous one, but as the voice of the user, we must ensure a 30 mins break does not include the time that it takes to drive and park at a lunch location.

I believe we’ve made great progress at providing a better working environment that includes workload equity and time to reset between visits. I take pride in working at Enjoy because I know we are continuously looking for the balance between business requirements and the employees’ experience. This project was all about making sure we put people first, and I’m excited to continue to pave the road towards making Enjoy an amazing place to work at.