Improving the employee experience for support workers
InLife assistant lifecycle
Services provided
Qualitative research
Journey mapping
Co-design
Service design
Ideation
Background
InLife is a not-for-profit disability support agency for people with frequent and often complex support needs, typically at least 25 hours per week. They emphasize building consistent support teams around clients, allowing for greater choice and control in daily routines. They employ a large workforce of ‘Assistants’ who make up these teams.
InLife engaged Made Simpler to help them design the best employee experience for their Assistants, using a human-centred design approach.
The challenge
Assistants' needs were not always congruent with client’s needs. Assistants seek to work the times and hours each week that their lifestyle demands. The schedule required by the client doesn't always match this. InLife needed a way to find the right combination of Assistants to fill the roster required by the client.
“I got shifts that were difficult for me to work around my life. And hence why I couldn’t continue doing it.”
What we did
Facilitated collaborative workshops to unpack the current-state journey, identifying what was working well and where key challenges lay.
Mapped the existing Assistant experience, highlighting critical pain points and areas of value.
Conducted two rounds of in-depth interviews with a diverse group of Assistants — including those newly onboarded, long-term team members, and recent leavers — to capture a wide range of perspectives.
Performed thematic analysis to surface core priorities, needs, and friction points in the Assistant experience.
Developed clear, actionable problem statements to shape solution-focused workshops.
Co-designed the ideal end-to-end Assistant journey — from recruitment through to offboarding — in partnership with cross-functional teams across InLife.
Delivered a comprehensive roadmap of initiatives and feature concepts aligned to the shared vision for an improved Assistant experience.
Developed a visual representation of the employee experience to support storytelling and inspire action
The result
Placing the Assistant’s voice at the heart of this project was critical to ensuring all initiatives and future work remained truly user-centred. InLife now has a clear roadmap for delivering a seamless onboarding and working experience for Assistants. Just as importantly, teams across HR, Operations, Transformation, and Customer Service are now aligned around a shared vision for what that experience should be.
“Made Simpler invested significant effort in understanding the business and its key stakeholders. Their approach to time management, deliverables, communication, and relationship-building was consistently of the highest standard”