
Best Buy Employee Check-Ins
Designing and implementing a standardized, unified digital experience for daily check-ins, that allows Best Buy retail store leaders to align with employees on goals and focus areas for the day, to improve performance tracking for employees and establish more consistent standards around leader to employee feedback.


Key Impacts
42%
Increase in daily check-in completion rate post release
~1hr
Daily reduction of capacity strain on leaders.
>90%
Adoption rate of new solution
My Role
Responsible for all design deliverables and driving vision & strategy:
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Defining problem statement for users and business.
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Defining long term vision and rollout strategy.
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Presenting strategy and vision to stakeholders for buy-in.
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Defining Information architecture.
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Visual and interaction design.
Discovery
Audit Existing Check-In Solutions



Discovery
Problem Definition

Currently there is no standardized experience for daily leader-to-employee check-ins across the Best Buy retail workforce. Leaders are therefore forced to craft their own check-in processes with the tools available to them. This is leading to a capacity strain on leaders, gaps in progress tracking, and variability in feedback quality.
Discovery
Understanding Check-In Goals
To be able to solution for a standardized Check-in experience, it was crucial to speak with store leaders and understand the purpose behind leader to employee check-ins.
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Quick alignment on goals and priorities
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Assessing employee's needs
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Progress monitoring and immediate feedback
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Promoting continuous learning and development

Discovery
Define Desired Outcomes and KPIs
Desired Outcomes
KPIs
Reduce capacity strain on store leadership
Reduction in daily time spent on employee check-ins.
Increase daily check-in engagement
Increase in daily check-in completion rates across the retail workforce.
Prevent misalignments between leader and employees during performance reviews.
Reduction of misalignment in ratings for leader vs employee's self-assessment of performance at annual reviews
Discovery
Defining Solution Hypothesis
Findings from the discovery phase were leverage to inform a solution hypothesis.
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Daily check-in experience designed to focus employees on daily goals.
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Accessible on the go through Connect mobile app.
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Employee initiated daily as to reduce capacity strain on leadership.
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Integrated into existing feedback and coaching experiences in Connect.
Discovery
Identifying Integration Opportunities.
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Allows leader to view development related insights that are specific to an individual.
Can be potentially leveraged to provide a leader with insights specific to an individual's check-ins.
Profile 360 Development Tab
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Allows leader to view development related insights for their team across multiple time frames (today, 7 days, month, quarter, year).
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Can be potentially leveraged to provide a leader with insights specific to their team's check-ins over time.
Feedback Tool Insights Tab
Design
User Journeys
User flows were created to better illustrate proposed user journey and system integrations.

Design
Initial Low-Fidelity Wireframes

Design
Validating Initial Concepts
Once alignment was reached with the project stakeholders, initial concepts were presented to a user group of store leaders, general managers, and marketplace directors for their initial impressions and feedback.

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Users validated an employee initiated check-in approach for time savings.
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Users expressed a need for viewing more insights around check-ins.
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Users validated integrated tools as appropriate locations for check-in data.
Design
Refining & Finalizing Designs
Check-In Form

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Form consisted of only 4 questions and only one open ended text field in order to keep check-ins lightweight and non-disruptive to employees' workday.
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Multiple choice questions were also incorporated to allow for the collection of quantitative insights to be surfaced to team leaders.
Design Decisions
Feedback Insights Tab
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Check-In section added surfacing a breakdown of today's check-ins and their status, allowing leaders to click in and take action.
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Additionally, collective insights were surfaced to leaders around employee responses for focus area and emotional score questions.
Design Decisions

Profile Development Tab

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Check-In section added to employee's profile allowing both the employee and their leader to view their latest check-ins and their status.
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Check-Ins Trends section also added giving the employee and their leader insight into their check-in submission rate, focus areas, and emotional score over time.
Design Decisions
Reflection
Key Challenges
Key Challenge #1
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Stakeholder skepticism around an employee initiated
check-in process vs leader initiated.
Resolution
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Employee initiated flow presented to test group of store leaders who validated it for freeing up capacity.
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Key Challenge #2
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Engineering concerncs about implications to page performance when adding check-in insights to Insight tab of feedback tool.
Resolution
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Consolidate information in Insights tab into accordion menus by topic, to mitigate load time and other performance issues.
Key Challenge #3
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Store leaders expressed concerns about effectively managing, validating, and addressing employee submitted check-ins during prototype testing.
Resolution
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Check-In cards were assigned 1 of 3 statuses: Not submitted, Needs Approval and Completed.
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Check-Ins awaiting approval were also denoted with an alert flag when employees made a selection on lower end of the scale for emotional well being question, or indicated they need additional support from leader.

Looking Forward
Planning for Future Iterations
Focus areas
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Surfacing more helpful data trends and insights to leaders around check-ins.
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Allowing leaders to digitally respond to check-ins with targeted feedback to employees.
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Surfacing individual performance metrics to employees in the check-in experience to better focus their entries.