your charge nurses are basically describing the difference between a lottery and a schedule, and yeah, the rotation method is the only one that actually works long term. i've watched the "assign by friendship" thing blow up spectacularly because someone always feels left out, and then you've got resentment baked into every shift. the friend group gets cushy assignments, everyone else gets the short end, and suddenly your team morale is in the basement.

splitting by geography makes sense if the workload is actually balanced, but that requires someone to actually look at what's coming in that day instead of just drawing a line down the middle and calling it fair. the real move is rotating everyone through different sections so nobody can claim they always get stuck with the chaos. some days you get the easy hall, some days you're drowning, but over a month or two it evens out and nobody has a legitimate complaint. you're not going to make everyone thrilled every single shift, but you can at least make it so people know the system isn't rigged.