The Valuing & Jerk Project
The Valuing & Jerk Project
Workplace culture is hard to change. Bias workshops haven't worked. What does work is making invisible behaviors visible — giving them a name, a face, and a character people can point to. Karen Holtzblatt is the creator of Contextual Design and one of the most cited researchers in human-computer interaction. I first encountered her work at an event hosted by FINRA, where I was working at the time. When I learned her organization WITOps was looking for volunteers on a new research initiative, I signed up. That initiative became the Valuing & Jerk Project.
Credits
Client:
Karen Holtzblatt, WITOps,
Creative Director: Peter Verastegui
The Problem
The tech industry is a boys club, so it comes as no surprise that U.S. tech companies do not provide a supportive workplace for women. In fact they are the exact opposite, hostlile. Fifty percent of women in STEM report gender-related discrimination. According to a report by the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) women in technology have an astonoshing 41% quit rate compared to just 17% for men.
One Part of The Solution
One Solution Karen Holtzblatt and her team at WITOPS came up with was to seek (through research) a better understanding of workplace interactions in order to identify specific behaviors which create or undermine the experience of connection and value in the workplace.
Two main behaviors
Women report that men, managers, or teammates are “bros” or “jerks”. But what does this mean? WITOPS’s research focused on understanding which behaviors are experienced as valuing and which result in naming the other as a “jerk”.
My contribution
Karen came to the project with the research, the behaviors, and a key constraint: animals were the right vehicle for personifying workplace behaviors, but many animals carry strong gender associations — a contradiction a project about gender equity couldn't afford. That constraint became the creative brief. I developed a collage and illustration concept that solved it — bold and specific without reading as gendered. Karen loved the direction and we ran with it, producing a visual system of 12 characters: posters, stickers, and emojis that teams could put on a wall and actually use. Not another bias workshop. Something people could point to. To learn more about this project visit WITOps's website.
