Nursing staff are overworked and burning out due to inefficient and inconsistent staffing as well as a slow decline in a reduction in workforce. As a result, personal schedules and life are hard to balance with work.

Work culture between managers and staff as well as between same-level nurse coworkers is becoming toxic due to scheduling rule and process inconsistencies. Availability processes are said to be like “the Hunger Games”, creating an every-nurse-for-themselves mentality.

Nursing managers and supervisors are stressed with the burden of scheduling and staffing because of inefficient and time-consuming workflows. Scheduling on paper or with older systems is hard to maintain, reference, and share with staff.

The only process keeping supervisors and managers on paper is schedule balancing and staff self-balancing. These paper processes are difficult to keep track of and require several iterations and additional printouts with each version. Any self-balancing of the staff also requires they still come in person, making schedule less mobile.

A series of four research visits were conducted at a particular hospital with the most diverse array of balancing methods. Recruiting was organized by customer success colleagues while scheduling and workshop formation was my responsibility. Research methods used were a workshop, individual and group interviews, artifact gathering, and cognitive-mapping usability walkthroughs with supervisors and staff in every department.

During the balancing research study, it was discovered that staff require a self-balancing stage when inputting availability and managers need to track rules when they are balancing a schedule. Key needs to make these actions effective were uncovered and ranked by frequency of request of the need. A motive of tracking rules applied to ensure fairness was a consistent theme in every supervisor’s balancing process.

An initial cross-function brainstorming session between research and product converted the research data into and initial, high-level product hypothesis. This hypothesis was broken down into development phases that kept in mind the current product as well as build time for design and engineering teams. This hypothesis was created also in collaboration with data science teams for initial back-end algorithm creation. These feature phases of the balancing feature were prioritized first because they are easier to build into the current product platform. The necessary information to be selected or shown in the features were outlined to consider actions and needs of the facility, supervisors, and staff equally. 

After collaborating on the product hypothesis with the product manager and data science team, I brainstormed a rough wireframe of the user experience of the onboarding process for all involved stakeholders. All of these processes have a top-down dependency starting with the facility. The repeated workflow of balancing separates the facility processes from the supervisor and staff processes because the low frequency of facility rule reconfiguration. The supervisor and staff workflows integrate a lot of the current flows to reduce the number of clicks and process learning needed to complete an action or set of actions. A majority of the balancing control is still given to the supervisor, but availability resubmission is built in as an optional phase to empower the staff with more availability choice, decreasing stress and uncertainty.

The main platform for the balancing feature is already created for the supervisor desktop application and the staff mobile application. These wireframes are therefore already in place to build off of or adjust. However, there is currently no facility application to configure or maintain rule settings. So to start, a wireframe and interface needed to be brainstormed for a facility application for onboarding top-down dependencies.