Assume your team comprises a hospital’s Labor-

Management Committee. This e-mail arrives from the hospital administrator:

Subject: Allocating Holiday Hours It’s that time of year again, and we’re starting to get requests for time off from every department. We have shifts where every physician and half the nurses want time off. Don’t these people realize that we can’t close down over a holiday? And what’s worse is that some of the shift leads are giving preferential treatment to their friends.
The head of the nurses’ union has already started complaining to me.
We need a comprehensive, hospital-wide procedure for assigning holiday vacation time that doesn’t make us shut down wards. It needs to be flexible, because people like to take a week off around Christmas. But we have to set limits: no more than one-quarter of the staff can take time off at any one time. And those nurses like to swap shifts with each other to arrange their days off into larger blocks, so we need to cover that too.
Write up a policy to keep these people in line. Be sure to throw in the safety concerns and regulatory stuff.

Your team will be performing these tasks:

a. Write a team response recommending a new policy and supporting your recommendations. Include two transmittal e-mails: one to the hospital administrator, and one to the hospital’s medical and nursing staff. Take care to address the two audiences’ different needs and expectations with good you-attitude and positive emphasis.

b. Create a one-page notice describing your new policy.
This notice should be suitable for posting at the duty desk for each ward—in full view of both your employees and your customers (the patients). Create an effective visual design that emphasizes and organizes the text.
You personally need to ■ Send e-mail messages to team members describing your initial point of view on the issue and discussing the various options.
■ Help your team write the documents.
■ Write an e-mail to your instructor telling how satisfied you are with • The decisions your team reached.
• The process you used to reach them.
• The documents your team produced.