AUSTRALIA POST EMPLOYEE DEVELOPMENT

With 64,900 Employees in 2022 across 4,300 locations is fair to say there are a lot of people who work for Australia Post. These people often start at the bottom and have ambition to contribute more to the company in decision making roles. But just because someone know the skills involved might not make them a good fit for the companies vision.

How can we improve the employee satisfaction & reduce cost to acquire talent?

This was the question presented to the management team. The best approach they had found in the past was to use a deck of conversation cards with the employee. The cards highlighted company values, enabling employees & managers to have constructive conversations. With the goal of enabling each team member to work in a job that most aligned with their values.

However during COVID is became very difficult to use this conversational tool as we now had to work virtually. The company also wanted to be more specific on their shared values, so it became clear that developing a digital version of the experience was required.

I was handed a PDF of the current cards and was given 4 days to think about what tech stack & scope was required to complete the work.

After playing with the cards & identifying the technical scope of the project on the first day. I still had 3 days left. There were a few unknown assumptionsthat I was making.. At the time I didn't know how to build

• A drag and drop experience
• Use markdown to render the content
• Render a PDF from dynamic data

I thought these crucial features to the user experience needed more understanding so I spent the remaining 3 days building a prototype to understand the scope more clearly.

To my surprise everything come together very smoothly & much faster than anticipated!
On day 2 I had completed development on all the features I was concerned about. So what to do with the remaining time?

On Thursday I started to think "What would it be like if I could build an entire end to end prototype of this web app & present it to the team on Monday"

Challenge Accepted

I then spent the next 2 days working on the project thinking about the state management & user experience. What would delight the managers and make the employees feel in control.

By Monday morning I presented a full working prototype on a private URL that the client could also interact with. Australia Post was blown away, saying this is the first time ever in 4 days they have received a complete design & working prototype. It made it simple for them to take away & refine the scope of the project.

When the feedback come back I was expecting the project to require a few touch ups and be done. However the prototype worked so well that the client was able to identify many issues with their original idea for conversational cards.

They came back with almost a complete re structure of the web app, being very specific on user experience & how to make the most of every conversation. Particularly around the way the application handled employee card selection.

This was great!

I could keep refining the solution & to be honest it really pushed me to improve my skills at the time.
The end outcome was fantastic! The aspect I enjoyed most on this project was making the web app fully accessible by keyboard & screen readers. Thank you to Inspire Group for giving me this opportunity to produce such a cool tool for Australia Post