Purple Shirt partnered with Arvida to deliver an experience-led piece of work focused on understanding a Day in the Life of village employees.
The work began with prework across the participating villages to build an initial picture of how rostering operated in practice. This included identifying:
- How rostering was managed at each participating village
- Who was responsible for rostering and related tasks
- Where approaches, tools and processes differed across locations
These early insights helped surface variation and complexity, and were used to shape early hypotheses and inform the conversations that followed.
We then worked collaboratively with village teams across roles and locations to explore:
- How rostering, kiosks and leave processes show up in everyday work
- Where inconsistencies or manual workarounds create extra effort
- How workload and role clarity affect people across a shift
- What good support looks like from the perspective of those delivering care
A key part of the approach was a co-design workshop that brought together people in the same roles from different villages. For many participants, it was the first time they had met colleagues doing the same work elsewhere.
This created space for open sharing, comparison and connection. It also allowed early findings from the prework to be tested and validated directly with village teams, ensuring insights reflected real experiences, rather than assumptions.
Through these conversations, people often realised their challenges were shared, and patterns emerged that would not have been visible within individual villages alone.
Insights were synthesised into a clear Day in the Life framework, mapping key tasks, struggles, needs and opportunity areas across the employee journey. This provided a practical, human-centred lens to support immediate rostering decisions while also informing longer-term employee experience priorities.
