Overview
Leadership within organizations sought a way to measure the impact of their employee development efforts. They also needed a method to uncover leadership gaps that weren’t immediately evident in 1-on-1 team meetings.

To address this, we developed Insights, a tool to track employee engagement through rotating questions (based on Gallup’s research) and an eNPS score. The tool not only provided data but also prompted actionable steps for leadership to improve engagement.​
Role
UX Designer, UX Researcher

Tools
Figma

Duration
6 months
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Team
Monica Posluszny, Kaly Nasiff (PM), Tyler Wilson (Team Lead), Rel Gray (Front-End Engineer), Christopher Bean (Front-End Engineer), Mitch Genova (Front-End Dev) Randel Bjorkquist, Shawn Vernon (QA), Jordan Falconer (QA)

The Problem

“The majority of the U.S. workforce (65%) is not engaged, according to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace: 2022 Report”

A key insight driving this project came from Gallup’s research, which revealed that a significant percentage of employees are disengaged at work. This lack of engagement is often linked to unspoken issues that affect company culture.

User Problem
Employees may feel uncomfortable sharing their true feelings about work, often leading to resentment or festering issues. This is exacerbated by insufficient communication and lack of visibility into potential culture problems.

Business Problem
Organizations needed a way to track the effectiveness of their leadership development efforts and assess whether their investment in the platform was delivering tangible results. They also required a method to surface leadership blind spots and monitor progress over time.

Research

I closely collaborated with the PM to conduct thorough research. We didn’t have direct customer access, but I interviewed internal stakeholders such as customer success and sales teams to understand the key drivers for using Leadr and insights they sought. Key findings included:
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  • Leadership valued Insights as a tool for upper management rather than individual contributors.
  • There was a need for coaching prompts based on the data to support leadership development.
  • Metrics should show the value of Leadr and avoid feeling “big brother-ish” to promote coaching rather than micromanagement.
  • We needed to clarify existing metrics, such as "last login," which was often misinterpreted.
  • Several leadership blind spots, like lack of goals for certain employees, needed visibility to spark action.
  • Cultural shifts in an organization were challenging, and data to track progress was highly valuable.

In addition to internal interviews, I researched best practices for data visualization (favoring simple bar and line graphs) and conducted a competitive analysis of similar projects.

Ideation

After gathering research, I moved into ideation, collaborating with the PM, engineers, and QA's. To foster diverse input, I introduced “design charettes,” where the team explored ideas using FigJam. With the research insights and problem context in mind, I wanted to ensure everyone had a chance to contribute to shaping the vision of the platform. 

​Each member had their own board to brainstorm with prompts from different perspectives—executive, manager, and individual contributor—and we spent five minutes on each. Afterward, we discussed the concepts and identified common patterns.

Key Insights from the Discussion:
  • Collaborative Feature Refinement
    My PM and I refined each feature together, focusing on showing data over time, by specific days, and by managers and their direct reports. There were 18 questions in total (6 per category), with one question from each category asked each month, alongside the eNPS question. It would take six months for all questions to be covered.

  • Pulse Survey
    A scale question for the pulse survey was suggested by the team lead, and we decided to display this monthly.

  • 1:1 Meetings
    We also considered the importance of tracking regular 1:1 meetings, as consistent in-person connection was vital for growth.

  • Anonymity in Surveys
    Ensuring survey anonymity was a priority, so employees felt comfortable sharing candid feedback.

  • Cross-Departmental Comparisons
    Lastly, we discussed the ability to compare metrics across different departments, teams, and managers for more actionable insights.

Results

The resulting solution, Insights, was a data dashboard that anonymously surfaced employee responses about engagement, including maximization, clarity, and rapport, based on Gallup’s research.
Key features included:
  1. Engagement Analysis – Displaying overall company engagement trends, department-specific data, and user group insights over time.
  2. eNPS Analysis – A simple, actionable score asking whether employees would recommend working at the company.
  3. Leadr Coach – A section prompting leadership with actionable insights based on employee feedback.
  4. Engagement – A snapshot of current engagement levels based on the latest survey.
  5. eNPS – An ongoing measure of employee sentiment, based off the most recent survey.​
Insights delivered measurable results for the organization:
  1. Enabled leadership to see trends over time, compare engagement across teams, and address blind spots.
  2. Increased leadership engagement and provided actionable steps based on data.
  3. Allowed for regular tracking of eNPS and overall employee engagement, helping managers identify areas for improvement.

Some customer quotes we received:
  • “This is helping me remember to consider my team as people, outside of the tasks they complete that contribute to our reporting”

  • "I like the point of how it creates a conversation that needs to happen that may not happen otherwise... it also gives me a point to check in and pose a question I may not have asked MYSELF in a while. Maybe I've just been DOING and haven't stopped to ask myself how things are."

  • “You know looking at this data I am really happy to know that amid the change and transitions, people still seem to be happy working here. Leadr is such an intentional platform which is what really drew me to it in the first place. People don't quit a job, they quit the person they are working for. You look at about $5,000 going out of your account and think 'wow that's a chunk of change' but you really can't afford to not do it."

  • "I wish you could have been a fly on the wall yesterday as I showed the results of the first Insights survey in our leadership team meeting. The staff-wide data was interesting, but as soon as I showed the views by department and manager, people were jumping out of their chairs and literally cramming themselves around the screen to see where their departments and direct reports “stacked up."

  • "It was really fun and kind of hilarious! We got to celebrate some and poke fun at others (all in good fun). I think that the Insights functionality is going to be a big help in driving leadership engagement. Perhaps our natural competitiveness will come out, as no one wants to be the one with the fewest responses, the lowest scores, etc. I’m excited to track this over time!"​​

Please note, I have the names of the companies that provided these quotes; however, I am unable to share them publicly. If needed during an interview, I can mention the details.

Reflection

This project was a massive undertaking, and as one of the developers aptly put it, “we built an app within an app.” Looking back, we realized the MVP could have been more streamlined, with additional features added incrementally.
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This experience reinforced the importance of planning effectively and learning from the process. Aside from that, this was my first major project at Leadr and it was incredibly fun to work with my team and have so much creative freedom in shaping how this feature would look!

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