Renata Martinez

Avante's employes study to support HR strategic decisions

01 Case

Avante is a social impact firm focused on the Brazilian Microentrepreneur market. The purpose is facilitate the micro-entrepreneurs access to the financial service and contribute to the growth of their business.

The company's structure is based on 3 verticals: People, Propose and Performance.

Along with the RH team we built the 'People' vertical. Using Ux research techniques and design thinking approach we learned from our employees.

The goal of the project was understand the needs of employees for a better experience in their day-to-day in the company.

02 Challenge

Provide a better understanding of the needs and motivations of the Avante's employees in order to support the HR in short, medium and long-term planning

03 My role

I co-led this project. I participated in all stages: Research planning, recruiting of employees, preparation of activities, conducting contextual interviews, analysis and documentation.

04 Approach

We divide the research into two steps:

  1. Sales force (98 employees at that time)

  2. Office (30 employees at that time)

The research planning included:

  • Quantitative Research - in order to extract questions and hypotheses for the next phase of qualitative research. It also gave us inputs about the profile of employees we wanted to recruit to talk.

  • Qualitative Research - We did 4 weeks of contextual interviewing in 4 different states in Brazil: Maranhão, Pernambuco, Ceará and São Paulo. In the contextual interview we covered sensitive subjects (taboo within the brazilian culture) such as money, salary, so we prepare some activities to guide the conversation and make it smooth.

To understand the cash flow of employees we use candy to represent their money.

04 Solution

After a deep understand about our employees, we created some boards to communicate the main findings. The HR used the insights to develop the strategic and tactical planning based on our people's real needs.