Optimizing Retail Pharmacy Staffing: A Multiframe Analysis

This thesis project uses the four frames described by Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal in Reframing Organizations—structural, human resources, political, and symbolic—to analyze the issue of pharmacy technician understaffing at CVS Pharmacy, with the goal of identifying solutions for prevention and mitigation. First, the pharmacy industry and CVS Pharmacy are introduced. The process of prescription pick-up, the types of pharmacy employees and their various responsibilities, and the way CVS Pharmacy schedules its workers are all explained for context. The structural, human resources, and symbolic frames are used to identify features of CVS Pharmacy that present opportunities for improvement and the potential consequences of inaction (employee burnout and withdrawal, strained relationships between coworkers, low-quality customer service and general inconvenience, reduced accessibility of essential medications and services, increased risk of practitioner error, and the overall loss of profits and the company’s good reputation). The structural and human resources philosophies of problem solving are used to identify potential solutions. Considering the current circumstances of CVS Pharmacy and ongoing trends in the industry, the most helpful long-term understaffing solutions would be seeking out employee feedback and building strong working relationships, creating new roles like night teams, investing in labor-replacing technologies to increase a pharmacy’s maximum output, and modifying existing staffing technologies.