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Client
Hoolekandeteenused

Industry
Public services, healthcare

What we did?
Service design

Challenge

Hoolekandeteenused (HKT) offers live-in welfare services to people with intellectual disabilities or mental health disorders, who are unable to live completely on their own.
The homes are in residential neighbourhoods and are a part of a process of de-institutionalisation of mental care, helping to re-integrate special needs people into society.

HKT wanted to improve the quality of services it offered to its clients (residents in the care home). The presumption was that staff needed better processes and methods to do so. Our brief was to help develop these processes and methods.

Process

Over the course of six months we conducted interviews and workshops with different care home staff and, where possible, with clients. We followed this up with shadowing of staff in the care homes. The research highlighted the organisation’s challenges that accompanied de-institutionalisation: the central organisation administering the various care homes, by following the various applicable rules and regulations, was creating an administrative workload that was slowly over-whelming the care staff in the homes.

 

Result

The results of our research showed that staff were not lacking the skills or tools for working with clients. What they lacked was the time to do so. We uncovered a work process that was uncoordinated and ad-hoc. Daily tasks, both admin and household chores, had developed over time, were often dictated centrally and required immediate attention. The work process for staff had never been looked on as a whole. Because of the disjointed nature of these tasks, staff were left with very little time for meaningful interaction with clients.

Consequently, the service that was designed was the daily working process. Administrative tasks were assigned a defined time-slot and all scattered daily tasks were gathered there. This made the daily work-flow for staff much more efficient, freeing up 2-3 hours per day, for them to work with clients.

 

Epilogue

For the HKT, the service design process was unnerving, when it seemed that their stated goal could not be solved. No one knew what the outcome of the service design would be. It was just very important, that it would improve the lives of the clients. Equally important was the caveat, that the solution couldn’t add costs to the operation or the workload of staff. Re-designing the administrative tasks ticked all the boxes of the brief, but did so in an unexpected way.

Client
Hoolekandeteenused

Industry
Public services, healthcare

What we did?
Service design

Challenge

Hoolekandeteenused (HKT) offers live-in welfare services to people with intellectual disabilities or mental health disorders, who are unable to live completely on their own.
The homes are in residential neighbourhoods and are a part of a process of de-institutionalisation of mental care, helping to re-integrate special needs people into society.

HKT wanted to improve the quality of services it offered to its clients (residents in the care home). The presumption was that staff needed better processes and methods to do so. Our brief was to help develop these processes and methods.

Process

Over the course of six months we conducted interviews and workshops with different care home staff and, where possible, with clients. We followed this up with shadowing of staff in the care homes. The research highlighted the organisation’s challenges that accompanied de-institutionalisation: the central organisation administering the various care homes, by following the various applicable rules and regulations, was creating an administrative workload that was slowly over-whelming the care staff in the homes.

 

Result

The results of our research showed that staff were not lacking the skills or tools for working with clients. What they lacked was the time to do so. We uncovered a work process that was uncoordinated and ad-hoc. Daily tasks, both admin and household chores, had developed over time, were often dictated centrally and required immediate attention. The work process for staff had never been looked on as a whole. Because of the disjointed nature of these tasks, staff were left with very little time for meaningful interaction with clients.

Consequently, the service that was designed was the daily working process. Administrative tasks were assigned a defined time-slot and all scattered daily tasks were gathered there. This made the daily work-flow for staff much more efficient, freeing up 2-3 hours per day, for them to work with clients.

 

Epilogue

For the HKT, the service design process was unnerving, when it seemed that their stated goal could not be solved. No one knew what the outcome of the service design would be. It was just very important, that it would improve the lives of the clients. Equally important was the caveat, that the solution couldn’t add costs to the operation or the workload of staff. Re-designing the administrative tasks ticked all the boxes of the brief, but did so in an unexpected way.

The Tallinn Business Incubator is charged by the city to help startup business grow up. After 10 years of working one way, we helped redesign their incubation process. We researched the competition, interviewed former and current incubants and intensively trained the incubator staff.

The incubator‘s target businesses can be anything from hair-dressers to technology start-ups in the fashion business. The incubation period was for up to 3 years and involved many forms of business training, all which made perfect sense for professional managers.

However, these 2-4 people firms were not professional managers. They were a specialists at something, whether it was video animation or high-quality on-demand printing. For them, the greatest value offered by the incubator, as it turned out, was cheap office space in the center of the city. Secondly came the serendipity of being in a building with like-minded, entrepreneurial people. The mentoring and training programs provided by the incubator were considered, at best, necessary evils and at worst, a waste of time. The motivation for the people was to become better at what they do, not become managers.

Subsequently, we helped re-design the entire incubation process, with the expressed focus on “improving the professional skills of the people in the incubator”. This approach has greatly improved satisfaction with the incubator, created a natural mentor flow of former incubants and increased the word-of-mouth about the value of the process.

Incubation process mapWeb design by Velvet

inkubaator.tallinn.ee/en/