Project Context

At Sanofi, a leading Pharma company, rapid growth led to a proliferation of digital applications without centralized direction. This project aimed to enhance employee satisfaction by aligning digital tools with their needs.

My role involved creating an initial employee journey by conducting one-on-one interviews to Sanofi's employees across three countries—USA, Brazil, and Germany—to map out employee experiences from their recruitment to benefits enrollment. This data formed the basis for creating comprehensive employee journeys, connecting experiences with HR resources and underlying technologies.

Research

Before starting any kind of research I found particularly important to dive into the different Sanofi applications to get the right context. Adapting the screeners according to the different roles and regions was especially tricky as every country and role used different applications within Sanofi.
The next steps were organizing the logistics, conducting the interviews, and analysing the data.

‍Oganizing all the logistics to conduct the interviews:

• Planning the interviews schedule and available slots according to each country.
• Creating the screener and discussion guide getting approval through iterations with the teams.
• Contacting different Sanofi's employees to propose joining the study.
• Organizing all the communication with participants.

Conducting 18 one-one-one interviews amongst the three different countries (USA, Brazil, and Germany):

• Conducting, recording, and taking notes of each interview.
• Regular brief meetings with Sanofi's teams to expose inicial insights.

Gathering  and analysing the data:

• Rewatching the videos for further note taking.
• Gathering topics, creating/applying tags, and uncovering related insights via Affinity Wall and Excel.
• Review these insights with Sanofi's teams in order to agree on hypothesis and final insights.

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Findings

To reflect on the gathered data, I identified that the main high-level structure should come from the key stages of employees' journey within Sanofi:  Engage - Work - Grow - Benefit.  Drawing upon this framework, and after carefully reviewing all the organized and analyzed data, we came up with the following insights and pain points:

• Sanofi's applications are fragmented and unorganized: employees expressed frustration with the abundance of sites, finding it challenging to locate desired information. The lack of clear focus and scattered information across multiple sites increases the difficulty, making searching an cumbersome task.
• Lack of country-specific focus: employees stated they rarely visit the global Sanofi’s sites, preferring to use their country-specific tools and sites. They said they find what they need in their country-specific sites in their local language. They feel they do a better job of tailoring the content to their country role.
• Complex and overwhelming design solutions: employees find Sanofi's applications complex due to excessive information, some duplicated, leading to inefficiency in navigation and comprehension.
• Lack of user status feedback: processes and solutions often fail to provide employees with clear updates on their next steps or activity statuses, sometimes sending irrelevant email notifications. This leads to additional mistakes and confusion among employees.
• Help not very helpful (even when it is human): users voiced frustration regarding the support provided for problem-solving, particularly with slow response times for IT tickets. Human support isn't consistently accessible or easily locatable. Additionally, when available, language barriers or lack of expertise can increase the delays in problem resolution.

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"Understanding is a barrier… I don't know how to fix it. I am not paid to understand how tech works, I am just paid to use it" Sales (USA P2)

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Recommendations

To elabore our recommendations, I engaged in multiple rounds of collaboration with Sanofi's Design and Strategy teams. Presented below are the most pertinent recommendations resulting from these collaborative efforts:

Centralization of Sanofi's tools and sites: create consistency and cohesion all along with the sites. Improve the sites by establish real connection and dialogues amongst the different Sanofi digital solutions.

Clear communication between the systems and employees: elaborate fluent and transparent communication through synthesis, concise information, and human-computer dialogues. Make sure the whole ecosystem is accessible to everyone.

Engaging employees: engage employees by offering them in the first instance what is really interesting for them. Put their local and country-specific needs on top. Find a balance between global and local if there are discrepancies. Offer valuable help at completing their tasks, and support related to their concerns, professional goals, development, and expectations.

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"What I find most important to me is what my local culture is [...], I feel that is the culture I am part of" Sales (USA P2)