Redefining Veteran and Staff care with design.
Role(s): Visual Designer, User Experience Designer
Department(s): Employee Wellness, Public Affairs Office, Recreation Therapy
Time: May 2016 - October 2020
Employee Wellness
The Challenge
The Palo Alto Division of the Department of Veteran Affairs is home to more than 4,000 employees. The Employee Wellness program consisted of only 2 staff, a staff wellness coordinator and a visual designer/communications designer. The biggest challenges throughout my time at the VA were: creating, developing, and marketing various programs in order to embed wellness within the culture of the VA, within the parameters of federal environment.
The Proposed Solution
In order to increase employee participation, retention and decrease burnout: through user experience: design, surveying and data analytics— create efficient and sustainable programs through marketing materials, planning, and a combination of Adobe Creative Cloud software and SharePoint.
The first step was to polish the existing branding.
To strategically shape a program around employees and to better serve them as a department, it was imperative that we survey how employees receive information, and while we’re there— find out what topics they were interested in.
We performed online/paper surveys and did outreach for 2-3 months once every two years. These are the results from 2019:
With this data, we increased communication through e-mail and print marketing and targeted our programs towards embedding physical activity into the culture within the VA.
This was also the culmination of huge changes within this system:
Daily fitness, mindfulness and yoga classes:
Roles: Design all digital/print media, designed programs to track user participation, developed marketing processes
Wellness everywhere… I mean in almost every building.
Fitness videos & Staff Tutorials
Roles: Develop, film and edit videos/tutorials for staff utilization
The Wellness 365 Web and Mobile App!
Prior to my departure, Wellness365 had begin creating both a web and mobile application to assist with efficiency— developing the class (yoga, fitness, mindfulness) program further. Because of COVID, this project was halted a few times, and eventually turned into an all-in-one platform where each class can be attended via Zoom.
The main prioritization was functionality, allowing employees to go in, book, view what classes are coming up, and attend through a Zoom link in the description of each class.
The Result
Through the combined efforts of the Employee Wellness department: staff participation of class programs, events, work “challenges”, went up to around ~1,500+ employees annually. Employee engagement of SharePoint and other wellness platforms rose from ~30 clicks/month to ~500 clicks/month.