Dalle-2 prompt: a productive and happy scene in a hospital with a nurse and doctor exchanging a clipboard in the style of a cubist illustration emphasizing primary colors
A prominent Children's Hospital recognized the negative effects of an overworked workforce and aimed to create a more balanced and sustainable work environment. A comprehensive current state assessment was conducted to evaluate the current workplace experience, and workforce representatives were assembled to co-create a future state workplace experience vision. The resulting recommended roadmap to achieve the future state vision focused on composability and explainability, empowering the hospital to move quickly, make informed decisions, and measure impact.
I served as the Lead Workplace Experience Designer on a cross-functional team, working closely with Workplace Strategists, Organizational Change Management specialists, and Technical Architects. My responsibilities included leading Design Thinking Workshop facilitation, conducting discovery interviews and analysis, and the creation of personas, future state journey maps, and a comprehensive service blueprint. I also contributed to the development of a detailed 6-month project plan and a 3-year roadmap alongside my colleagues.
The healthcare workforce was one of the most significantly impacted groups following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the unprecedented demands on healthcare systems, more than half of surveyed healthcare workers reported feeling stressed, overworked, and ready to leave their jobs (source: Harvard Gazette). On top of the burden of caring for the public during a global pandemic, there were additional unexpected consequences. Hybrid work became the new normal, but workplace technologies and practices had not kept up with evolving healthcare worker needs, further exacerbating conditions.
Many hospitals were experiencing the negative effects of an overworked and exhausted workforce. They were facing a shortage of available staff and it was affecting the quality of patient care they were able to deliver. One children’s hospital in particular had already been in the process or transitioning to M365 as their workplace productivity suite in an effort to support their hybrid needs, but found the lack of a workplace strategy for implementation, mobilization, and change management was creating more burden than relief for their workforce. Recognizing this issue, this hospital saw an opportunity to invest in their workforce and collaborate with them to create an optimized strategy for their needs. Their goal was to create a more balanced and sustainable work environment for their teams, ultimately enabling them to provide the best possible experience for their patients.
The objective of our work was to create a realistic and achievable roadmap towards a shared vision for improving the workplace experience of this children’s hospital workforce. To achieve this, we conducted a comprehensive assessment of the current state workplace experience and assembled a diverse cross-section of representatives from all areas of the hospital to co-create a future state vision grounded in the lived experiences, preferences, and needs of the hospital workforce. Through our comprehensive research efforts we identified 5 key strategic workplace experience principles:
In our co-creation workshop sessions we leveraged these principles to map an optimized ‘day in the life’ for each of our identified persona archetypes. These journey maps became our north star vision for what the workforce experience should look and feel like to enable a workforce that is satisfied and empowered to provide the best possible care for their patients. These principles and comprehensive north star blueprint were used to guide and prioritize all decisions made for the proposed roadmap. If a decision, action, or investment was not directly mapped to activating one of the moments that matter in the ideal day in a life blueprint, it was not prioritized.
The resulting roadmap was designed to be composable and explainable, providing the necessary flexibility for the resource-constrained organization to quickly improve their workforce experience.
These factors empower the hospital to make prompt and informed decisions based on their available resources. They will also serve as a benchmark for reflection and measuring impact as progress is made.
A workplace initiative of this magnitude requires participation and buy-in from a wide and diverse group of stakeholders. Early strategy work may seem abstract, but it establishes a precedent and sets the direction for actions that could be taken several years into the future. In order for tangible and successful outcomes to be possible, it is important that the work begins with the right intentions and breeds a feeling of shared ownership over the vision and any decisions made. Critical to our kick off was the establishment of clear ways of working, roles, and a full-day, in-person workshop dedicated to alignment, trust building, and expectation setting.
The current state assessment involved conducting 20 interviews with representatives from different areas of the organization, administering a survey to nearly 500 participants, and conducting 6 workshops to gather information on the current tech landscape, as well as preferences for training, communication, and change management. This information was analyzed to identify 4 persona archetypes and key themes related to motivators, expectations, and workplace preferences. These findings were then used to guide the future state visioning and roadmap planning activities.
A vision workshop was conducted in person, bringing together key stakeholders from across the organization. The purpose of the workshop was to review the current state gap analysis, consider the perspectives of different persona archetypes within the organization, and envision the future of the children's hospital. This session resulted in a vision statement that served as a guiding north star as we charted the path towards the future of the hospital.
Children's Hospital is committed to leading in enterprise workforce experience by establishing a connected, trusted, and collaborative environment through the modernization, standardization, and simplification of our processes and tools, enabling us to focus on what truly matters: supporting our mission, patients, families, and workforce effectively, regardless of how and where we work.
With a newfound excitement and a clearly articulated vision statement, a workshop was conducted to co-create the ideal future state journeys for each of our key persona archetypes. A group of representatives for each archetype was assembled to level set on their current state workplace experiences, to then imagine and map their ideal future state workplace.
Leveraging the current state assessment and gap analysis alongside the co-created ideal future state experiences, we built out a service blueprint, demonstrating what the ideal hospital workplace might look like 5 years into the future. A few key deviations were made from a standard service blueprint to meet the objectives of this specific engagement.
Firstly, with the political nature of such a sweeping workplace experience initiative, all 4 of the persona archetypes had to be accounted for in the front stage journey. The approach for this requirement was to assess a “day in the life” for each of these personas, highlight the key moments and interaction points between the different experiences and perspectives.
Secondly, with our objective of mapping a realistic and attainable roadmap, the backstage people, props, and processes were tailed to be specific to the initiatives, technologies, and processes necessary to make the proposed future state system a reality.
