The Monday Campaigns - Top 5 barriers

The Challenge:

The Monday Campaigns (TMC) is a nonprofit public health initiative promoting healthy behaviors on Mondays. Its parent company is GRACE Communications Foundation.

TMC came to me with a tough task: deliver an unprecedented 5 barriers report which lays out why the organization was struggling to be successful and facing a high turnover rate despite an abundance of resources. In a little over a year, the turnover rate was 14 people out of a team of 16. TMC needed answers.

Results:

A report and presentation was delivered to TMC leadership that laid out the following recommendations:

Roles & Responsibilities

Outsource the hiring process, use better defined job requirements, and then let experts do their jobs

Work Environment

Escalate code of conduct violations to HR for resolution and then invest in staff’s ability to do their jobs to lower stress levels and improve employee satisfaction

Communication

Implement recurring project and team meetings and then create a culture of open communication and respect for staff roles on projects

Quality Standards

Embrace design team leadership and create a design system with basic visual and editorial style guides for each brand

Trust

Listen and talk to team members more to show faith in employees’ ideas and judgment

How I did it:

To identify barriers to TMC’s success and discover areas where the organization could improve, I performed an unorthodox ethnographic field study.

As part of this study, I observed how TMC’s team members interacted with each other and their office environment, and documented the organization’s idiosyncrasies.

Some observations included employees receiving tasks inconsistent with their job titles, behaving in ways that went against the organization’s code of conduct, and engaging in closed door conversations or whispering. Graphic design quality across the organization was observed to be poor and leadership didn’t seem to invest faith in their team either.

After completing the research, I drafted a report and designed a presentation in conjunction with my supervisor. A presentation was then delivered to TMC’s President and Managing Director.