Since its inception in 2012, the GRS UX team had grown steadily and attracted exceptional talent. However, years of under-investment in foundational practices created significant challenges that needed to be addressed before scaling further:

• Low morale and engagement: Team engagement scores were the lowest across the digital organization.

• High attrition: Attrition rates reached nearly 50% in 2021, contributing to instability.

• Career growth gaps: Lack of defined career paths led to over-levelling and inconsistent talent evaluation.

• Limited support for junior designers: Reliance on hiring senior talent was financially unsustainable.

• High dependence on contract resources: Approximately 40% of the team were contract employees.

• Design practice maturity: Employee exit interviews highlighted the need for stronger influence over outcomes and overall design maturity.

The image above illustrates employee departures from January 1, 2019 - December 31, 2022. Employee names have been changed.

As we worked to align design maturity with team sentiment, we saw an opportunity to strengthen the foundations of our practice and culture. By investing in career development, mentorship, and community, we could re-engage our teams, reduce attrition, and create a more sustainable model for growth. This was our moment to evolve not just how we design—but how we support the people who make great design possible.

We took a two-step approach to strengthen engagement, culture, and design maturity within the GRS UX team:

1. Understand and validate: We started by identifying pain points and evaluating whether the initiatives and improvements implemented to date were truly enhancing our employees’ experience at Sun Life.

2. Plan for the future: With insights in hand, we clarified opportunities to further support our people—ensuring we maintain a positive culture, high engagement scores, and sustainable growth as we scale.

Moving into 2022, we made numerous organizational and process-related changes intended to address challenges with collaboration and team member engagement:

After this we had gone through our digital transformation, The following were identified as additional opportunities to improve the overall GRS UX team member experience:

• Continue to formalize discovery cycles for UX - 50% of current staff did not agree that we get enough time for proper discovery work

• Work to better integrate Content Strategy/Design into UX Process - 20% of current staff did not agree that content is well-integrated into our process

• Continue to focus on people and their development by ensuring we have training budget for the team

• Continuous tracking of team engagement scores to identify gaps and potential red flags