Motivation in elder care

The municipality of Copenhagen is undergoing an important change these years when it comes to their service towards care demanding citizen groups like the elderly. The trend is to empower the citizens in taking care of themselves for as long as possible.

At the same time management is moving away from strict electronic control and survailance of employees work life.

Both of these changes have a great impact on the work life of the elder care. The change have proven to be a significant challenge for employees who traditionally have take great pride in providing the best service for the elderly. Often it is also more demanding for the employees to try to motive the elderly to do thing themselves. It is easier and less conflict creating to just do it for them.

How do you help the elderly the best? By doing it for them or motivating them to do it themselves? How do the employee best assess which solution to use?

The elder care services wanted their employees to discuss questions like these in a structured way, while opening their eyes to new ways of working.

In collaboration with consultants from the municipality, employees from the elder care and management, Workz developed a dialogue tool about the choices the employees make every day.

For the game we developed four different characters that exemplify different perspectives employees can have when trying to solve the issues of the elderly. From “Professional Samina” that evaluates the services and makes plans to “Helpful Jonas” that just want to do the dirty work and make the elderly happy.

The characters are used in the accompanying communication material as well.

Even though the material was made in collaboration with the elder care of Copenhagen, it can be used as it is in other cities as well.

The same process and approach can be targeted other professional areas as well.