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Essential Management Tips for Your Practice
The Attitude Virus is everywhere. It's contagious and it can spread in minutes. It infects the healthy worker and kills motivation. Symptoms include rudeness, poor service, lack of motivation and increased stress. Long-term effects result in employee turnover, lost productivity, customer complaints, absenteeism, increased employee and consumer liability, and a drain on profits.
People -- employees, managers and owners -- with bad attitudes spend the better part of their days figuring out ways to avoid work, complaining about the work they have to do, or redoing work. This is mainly the result of dissatisfaction on the job. The cost of all this in the U.S. alone is in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Health care today is one of the most competitive and changing industries. Creating a practice culture that can attract, motivate and retain patients -- and employees -- is the biggest challenge doctors face today and the key to remaining independent. Profitable, growing practices have long realized that its people drive their success. Efforts to sustain an independent fee-for-service practice must focus on harnessing the potential of its most important resource -- people.
Creating a Practice Culture That Thrives
Practices that thrive and enjoy economic success will be the ones doing great work for their patients, encouraging employees to contribute, and recognizing patients and interest in the community. When a practice chooses to differentiate itself by value, not price, customer service beyond patient expectations must be delivered on a regular and consistent basis.
Exceptional service breeds loyalty. Loyalty develops long-term relationships. Relationships are founded on competence and commitment, but competence and commitment do not come from demotivated doctors and employees.
Post-Millennial Practice Management
According to a recently released survey of employee attitudes, job satisfaction and employee retention is directly impacted by how fairly an employee is treated and rewarded. Financial rewards, although important, were not singled out as most important in job satisfaction. The most satisfied employees, which in turn are the most productive and most likely to remain in and on the job, are concerned with satisfaction from the work itself, having the opportunity to learn new skills, and receiving feedback from their managers.
Learning new ways to manage and better ways to perform is no longer a choice but a necessity. A good attitude starts at the top. Work attitudes have changed. Increasing demands on performance and increasing workload have changed employee expectations. This often leads to tension in the workplace.
Creating a practice climate with a renewed focus on the needs of your employees and patients will differentiate your practice in a competitive and demanding market.
Focus on Selecting and Retaining the Right Employee
Doctors must focus on how each employee thinks about doing his or her work and create policies and systems to get all the work done effectively with a minimum of stress. How can doctors build the commitment and engage their employees’ energy and attention?
Employee selection and employee performance assessment through software technology can help doctors and practice managers readily identify the potential of current and prospective employees, objectively identify gaps that may exist between current and expected performance, which skills may need to be developed, and what behavioral and motivational barriers might inhibit or counteract efforts to train or re-train an employee. Very simply, employee performance software technology helps you:
- Understand who you are working with, even before you hire.
- Determine natural skills an employee brings to the workplace.
- Recognize what training might be needed to close any skill gaps.
- Determine how intense this training needs to be.
- Find out how much resistance you can expect from the candidate or current employee.
Hundreds of pre-employment and employee development surveys exist to help doctors and managers assess employee performance, attitudes and potential in an effective and most exciting approach, such as SELECT for Health Care(c).
SELECT for Health Care is a personality-based survey designed to measure high performance characteristics important in most health care provider jobs. The research of Bigby, Havis and Associates, leading edge organizational psychologists, has identified several key personality characteristics that contribute to job performance. SELECT allows you to hire employees who remain composed under pressure, have a positive service orientation towards patients and are cooperative with other staff members. It helps you avoid those job candidates with low integrity and who are poorly suited for caregiver positions and your practice culture. Another survey, SELECT for Administrative Support, helps predict job effectiveness in administrative and clerical positions.
Investing in the Right People
Creating the right attitude and investing in the people who can most benefit will provide the post-millennium independent fee-for-service practice the fastest and largest return on the dollar. Investing in the right people makes financial sense and attracts employees who are prepared to function in a sometimes out-of-control world. This helps create a practice that retains patients who are willing to share responsibility for their own well-being and sustain a healthy, productive lifestyle.
Summary
Each individual comes to the workplace with his or her own unique communication, learning and relational style. Fitting the uniqueness of each employee to your practice culture should not be a crapshoot. Pre-employment and performance development tools are readily available. Doctors cautiously and deliberately do their research before selecting the right hand piece, impression materials and computer systems. Doctors must now find ways to overcome old assumptions and select employees with the attitudes, integrity and motivations that are compatible with a winning practice culture.
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