SUMMARY
- Coronavirus (COVID-19) has changed the way non-profits are delivering their work – with fewer staff, switching rapidly to remote ways of working
- This has caused challenges for non-profit leaders who are already at risk of burnout, working with limited budgets and resources
TEAM: Lou Shackleton & Emily Bazalgette
WHEN: May-June 2020
RESULT: A ‘return to work’ trello board, introduced in a Medium article
WHERE WE BEGAN
In Spring 2020, many British charities furloughed their staff in order to help survive the economic effects of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. I collaborated with another designer, Emily Bazalgette, to create an easy to understand, easy to pick-up-and-use resource: The Unfurloughing Return to Work trello board. It is now available as a public resource on Trello, free for anyone to use and adapt to their own needs.
NAVIGATING THE RETURN TO WORK
People who have been furloughed experience a mix of emotions: guilt, embarrassment, overwhelm, relief, concern, shame. It’s natural to feel unimportant or not needed, whilst also feeling powerless and helpless that other members of the team are still working. On returning to work, it would be easy to feel left out of key decisions and feeling a need to catch up.
While some staff have been furloughed, other team members have continued to work in challenging circumstances. These team members have likely been under additional pressure, managing a new and more complex workload. The type of the work may have changed entirely as organisations respond to government restrictions and changed demand from the public. It is natural to feel a combination of relief, resentment, and embarrassment as furloughed colleagues return to work.
In this context, we wanted to create a resource that would help non-profit leaders and their teams to navigate the return to work process with more ease. As the largest 100 charities have furloughed more than 33,000 staff, it was important to create a resource that would reduce pressure on teams and help ease the transition.
DESIGNING THE TOOL
From May-June 2020, I collaborated with a fellow designer, Emily Bazalgette, to help teams welcome furloughed staff back to work in a way that supports new priorities in a Covid-19 world.
Emily and I used a version of the design ‘double diamond’ to combine user research with social media listening insights, creating a tool and selecting a platform that would enable users to pick up the tool and use it as quickly as possible.
We worked in Miro, collecting quotes from informal interviews, what we were seeing on social media, and what we’d heard from non-profit leaders in the past. We used these quotes and insights to refine our hypothesis.
A TOOL PEOPLE CAN USE STRAIGHT AWAY
The Medium article introducing the board reached over 1000 people.
How to Unfurlough: Introducing the ‘Return to Work’ Trello board
Unfurling: Release from furled state; unfold (Source: Merriam-Webster) Unfurloughing: Releasing an organisation from crisis state; releasing capacity; refreshing teams Go straight to the Trello board Back in May 2020, it was widely reported that more than one in five British workers had been furloughed.
