Improving shift workers' experience

Challenge

In addition to permanent staff, NHS uses flexible staff in hospitals across the UK. This helps them make sure that all wards are at the right nursing capacity throughout the year.

NHS looked to improve the experience of potential staff interested in working for the NHS as well as current staff who book and manage their shifts through online systems. To do that, we needed to first understand the current experience.

Approach

Data analysis

I reviewed existing MI data such as call centre statistics, google analytics, internal reports as well as the results of a staff survey from the past year. This helped get an idea of the types of problems staff had as well as offered direction about what needed to be learnt further in user research. Some of the key findings were:

• It took an average of 7 minutes for nursing staff to book shifts via the contact centre.
• Nearly 42% of the flexible nursing staff who were available (3000) for taking a shift didn't do so in the past 3 months.
• 26% of all traffic to their online shift systems was via mobile but was not built to be responsive.

One to one interviews

I then planned and conducted 24 one to one interviews (remote and in person). We spoke with:

• staff who've worked there for several years to uncover problems that have persisted.
• newly joined staff to learn what problems to learn about their recent experience.
• ward managers who manage shifts for a specific ward in a hospital.

In these interviews we got to hear about their experience of joining NHS, using their systems to find shifts and manage their work schedule, recording their shifts, paychecks and their day to day tasks. We also got to see them using these online systems as they went about doing some of these tasks.

Some key things we learnt:

Journey mapping

Along with another UXer, we took the findings and started building out a low-fidelity journey map. We combed through all the interview transcripts to spot patterns, draw out the actions they took, the thoughts and questions they had and how they felt.

The map had 3 key stages: Joining NHS, Getting started and Using NHS over time.

We talked the lo-fi map with several stakeholders to get their point of view, how it resonated with them and then made a high fidelity version of it.

Creating personas

Through analysis, we also learnt that there were different groups of people emerging. We plotted the participants along various axes and found that their motivation to work shifts and frequency of wanting shifts were the key factors that grouped participants. This led us to create 3 personas:

The Joining persona represents candidates who are highly motivated to start working but are wary about the application process and don't entirely understand how NHS and shifts works.

The High Usage persona is primarily focused on staff who use NHS as their only source of work and hence rely on it. They interact with NHS offline and online several times a day looking for a shift that suits their needs and lifestyle.

The Infrequent Usage persona are staff who have less drive to use NHS as they either hold a full time role and only supplement their income by shift working.

Stakeholder workshop

I co-facilitated an ideation workshop with wider stakeholder teams where the customer journey map was used to identify opportunities to improve the customer experience and we as a team captured initial ideas on how we might do that.

We took turns to talk through each stage of the map, adding in quotes and stories from our research. We paused to get the room to reflect, share why that part of the service works that way and then capturing ideas on what we could change about it.

Impact

We helped key stakeholders understand why their service is performing the way it is. Through the workshop and the research findings, stakeholders could see and hear the why.

We helped NHS prioritise a series of actions that they'd need to take and start changing parts of their service. This included redesigning their shift management system and their application process.

Reflection

Several stakeholders came in with the perception that they needed to just update their systems. Doing the research helped me see and present that they needed some service changes which would they create a better experience for their shift staff.

We couldn't get enough security clearances to observe staff work in their environment. If I could do this again, I would've tried to do that first as I would've given the sense of context we couldn't fully get from interviewing.

No stakeholder was available to observe the interviews due their schedules. I gained experience of thinking of how to regularly update them as we went. This included emailing short interview summaries and bringing them all in as we put the low fidelity journey map together.