Speak Out Revolution

Key successes

• Designed and developed a user-friendly dashboard individuals and businesses alike can use to gain insights that support diversity and inclusion
• Worked with potential users and stakeholders to make sure the dashboard was both accessible and achieved its goals
• Handled sensitive data and an emotive topic with care and awareness, giving confidence and engendering trust

Exposing harassment and bullying

A 2020 report by the CIPD – the UK’s professional body for HR and people development – found that a quarter of UK employees thought bullying and harassment were ‘swept under the carpet’ in their organisation. Their UK surveys showed 15 per cent of workers had experienced bullying in the last three years, while four per cent said they’d been sexually harassed at work and eight per cent had experienced other forms of harassment. More than half of people who’d been bullied or harassed in the last three years didn’t report the most recent incident.

It’s this culture of silence that non-profit Speak Out Revolution wants to fight. They want to use insights to raise awareness, educate and empower everyone to become allies for more inclusive work environments. They’re gathering those insights using a rolling online survey where people can describe what’s happened or happening to them, whether they’ve done anything about it and the outcome of any complaints or reports they’ve made. They want to use the data from those shared experiences to increase transparency around harassment and bullying in workplaces to empower people and organisations to advocate for change. They also want to use the data they collect to encourage people to share their own experiences.

So, they needed a dashboard to collate and analyse their survey data to answer important questions about what’s happening in workplaces around the world. Questions like: What’s the most prevalent form of harassment and bullying people are telling us about? What’s the leading consequence of making a formal complaint? What’s the likelihood of the experience becoming better or worse after reporting the problem? Our business intelligence and analytics experts and user experience specialists worked on a pro bono basis to design and develop the dashboard Speak Out Revolution needed.

“One of our guiding principles is to focus on disruptive, data-driven strategic change. We wanted a dashboard that will be a powerful and effective tool for us and for users to leverage data in this challenging area. We were told PA were the best in the business and we’re delighted they took on this vital work for us,” says Frances Holmes, Chief Executive Officer, Speak Out Revolution.

Putting users at the centre of our design process

We used an iterative design process – workshopping prototypes of the dashboard with the Speak Out team and potential external users to make sure we created a tool that would support users’ requirements. We have a wide range of experience in creating similar tools. This includes an award-winning live dashboard that monitors and accurately predicts COVID-19 trends, providing real-time and predictive intelligence for global consumer product business Unilever. We’ve created dashboards for a government department and we developed a dashboard bringing together data on maintenance work often held separately across the organisation for housing company Sovereign.

Working alongside the Speak Out Revolution team, we carried out user research and created personas to understand the context around the dashboard, uncover less obvious needs and specify user requirements. Armed with those we sketched and co-designed as many different ideas as possible.

We then refined these designs, wireframing, prototyping and producing high fidelity mock-ups, ensuring the designs met requirements and, critically, best-in-class accessibility standards. We had to make sure the language used was clear and concise but would also resonate with people, so they’d share their own experiences. To keep the dashboard uncluttered we added ‘tooltips’ to expand on certain terms people might not know, like ‘gaslighting’, for example. We tested our ideas with target users and stakeholders repeatedly to make sure the dashboard was achieving its goals.

Empowering individuals and organisations

The first release of Speak Out Revolution’s dashboard is now up and running and available to organisations and individuals alike. It highlights six main metrics anyone can filter by sector and has a menu allowing you to look at the data in more detail. The dashboard allows Speak Out Revolution to present global insights to help current and future targets of harassment or bullying handle their experiences effectively. By reading about others’ experiences and seeing statistics on the topic they could feel more confident about raising an issue, for example. At the very least, they might feel able to share their own story through the survey and add to the voices speaking out on the issue. And the platform empowers organisations to draw on the data to ensure their diversity and inclusion strategies are based on lived experiences. In turn this will drive positive change.