QE High Performance Team Concept
The concept of the three staff member partnership used to create the high performance team is the most dynamic aspect of the QE Staffing & Scheduling Methods. Although the mathematical day on/day off sequence used in the team schedule is the foundation and the most important factor of the methods, it is dependent on the dynamics of successful team formations. Some of the team formation dynamics are as follows:
Skill Level Teams
Depending upon patient acuity levels and patient sections/locations within a nursing facility, high performance teams can be developed for special duties such as a Heavy Care Team or Light Care Team whereby individual team member skill levels can be combined for specialized care.
Veteran nursing staff and trainees:
Due to turnover and shortage of qualified staff available for hire, pairing two veteran workers together with one new hire trainee was a practical first step in team formations. Every day that the new hire trainee is scheduled for work, one veteran worker is assigned as a trainer using the “learn by doing” teaching method. Due the unique nature of the scheduling sequences in the QE methodology, the two veteran workers train the new employee for an equal amount of time (balance of two different teachers).
Age diversity pairing:
There is a growing pool of older workers who may not be capable by themselves to perform physically demanding, labor intensive work. By pairing two younger workers with an older one, more job opportunities for older workers are created. Furthermore, this pairing could be a significant advantage in nursing homes whereby an older worker may have more sensitivity to aging problems. The older workers could be veterans or trainees. They could remain in the job longer regardless of the physical labor, and this would help expand the labor pool of potential workers.
Cultural/Diversity pairing:
Labor-intensive services, especially nursing homes, are becoming more dependent on immigrants that may have language difficulties that impact communication and interfere with their work performance. There is no clear cut formula for pairing different workers of different cultures/languages, but it is a dynamic variable that needs to be explored in resolving some of the issues of a multi-cultural labor pool.
Other kinds of diversity pairing considerations:
Other dynamic variables to be considered in pairing workers are gender differences, education levels, personalities/attitudes, social interests, physical characteristics, locale/transportation and leadership abilities of team members. More research with applications of the QE Staffing and Scheduling Methods' use of high performance team concepts are needed to understand and answer questions about these variables.