Your Staff Stress Solution
Four Principles to Ensure Healthy Staff Success
PRACTICE
MANAGEMENT
Josh Wagner,
DC
Last week, I was on the phone with a longtime friend who has been an all-star CA for 15 years for a few different practices. She recently left a practice without great feelings for the doctor. I asked her, “You still hate him [the doctor]?” She replied, “Yes, and I still talk to all of the other CAs, and they hate him too!”
Then there aie stories I hear almost every month from DCs who find out their CA has been stealing from them—cash theft, personal charges on the company credit card, credit card refunds to their personal card. The possibilities of theft aie endless.
[Side note: Doctor, do not let anyone have more control or knowledge of your finances than you, including your accountant]
What causes theft and resentment by staff? A lack of respect for the DC. And when respect is gone, ifs raie for it ever to be regained. So how can you start off on the right foot with future staff members and CAs, as well as not lose it with your current staff? Implement the four following principals and you’ll see immediate changes for the better.
Losing respect from your staff isn’t just about the possibility of theft. That’s a small 1% issue. The real issues aie lack of job performance, energy, enthusiasm, or profitability and ease inside your practice. By following these four steps, you’ll avoid future CA disappearance, performance issues, theft, resentment, and practice sabotage.
Your CA and staff really aie your practice’s biggest asset. They must be treated greatly if you want them to be great for you and your practice. Many patients stay with a DC and practice for the long ran primarily because of a CA. Patients could easily go elsewhere or price-shop around, but not when they’ve formed a relationship with your front office person that is not so easy to replace.
1. Hire Based on Character and Personality—Not Experience or Skills.
There’s nothing more valuable than the attitude and intent a CA brings to his or her position. This is their energy. It counts ten times more than any administrative or phone skill. This is the top trait to look for when hiring, and you can know if it’s there within the first 30 seconds of a conversation. It’s palpable when you’re with someone. You could avoid a ton of wasted time by having your current staff weed out candidates with initial three-
than the attitude and intent a CA
brings to his or her position. 5 5
minute Skype or FaceTime interviews to assess this. Anyone who passes your staff’s test can then meet you. Bottom line, you should be able to gauge quickly whether this candidate makes other people feel comfortable and happy around them. Is he or she eager to learn and increase his or her job role? Is he or she looking for more to do or just completing eveiything exactly within the time provided? Does he or she ask good questions and act fully engaged? During a shadowing or trial employment period, does he or she make patients smile with conversation? All of these ai e subtle factors that aren’t possible to learn from a resume, but they do reveal whether an applicant or trial hire is an all-star.
2. A Great Bonus Structure and Schedule.
When you have a bonus structure in place that rewards your staff for practice performance, you’re going to increase your bottom line and staff happiness. Your bonuses should only be based on profitability increase and not on random metrics, such as olfice visit numbers, new patient (NP) numbers, or any statistic that doesn’t explicitly relate to monetary increase. An increase in NPs doesn’t always equal monetary increase. It could mean 90% of NPs don’t show up for visit two or three and cause burnout, exhaustion, and stress to your team. In addition, a revenue increase could also equate to lowered profitability if you’re spending a lot more to achieve revenue increase.
Make sure your numbers aie congruent when you’re setting goal statistics, and make sure your bonuses aie worthy of the extra effort needed by staff to achieve them. Remember that if you’re staff members are getting bonuses then it means you’re taking home even bigger bonuses too. That’s a win-win.
As for your practice’s schedule, you can fit eight full patient shifts into a Monday through Thursday workweek and have Friday through Sunday off every week. That means your CA gets that time off too. For most people that’s a dream job. Too many DCs work on Saturdays because they’re told they have to in order to see patients who aie children or to make more revenue. It’s just not true and it causes burnout for you and staff. One day off in the middle of the week or half-days off randomly throughout the week don’t equate to the necessary detachment and needed break for a DC or CA every week. Give yourself and your staff this gift, and watch everyone’s energy, productivity, and practice profitability increase while enjoying longer weekends.
3. Clarity and Direction Everywhere.
One of the simplest yet overlooked aspects of leadership is having clearly defined directives for those who aie being managed. Eveiy single aspect of job performance should be written down and clearly understood, as well as the results that aie expected. There’s a big difference between, “Call these 10 patients whom we haven’t heard from in a while, please,” and, “Get in touch with these 10 patients with this discussed intention and this specific message (note: not a robotic script), and make sure at least half aie scheduled for next week.”
Here’s the easy part for you. Have your CA write his or her own job duties manual from knowledge and then you correct it where necessary. This will save you countless hours in future training in the event you have to hire a new CA who will have to start from scratch. Now there’s a clear manual to go by for every task, especially if you’re current CA will not be around to train the next one and it falls purely on your shoulders.
4. Open Communication.
This feature is most often left out of the olfice staff dynamic and relationship. We all show up to work together coming from very different lifestyles, families, and living situations. We all
have stress and drama in our lives, and there’s no escaping it. The difference is how much of our stress is brought into the work environment and how much is left outside of the practice’s walls.
If your CA is going through a breakup or financial crisis, don’t think for a second that
your practice is going to exceed expectations that week, much less perform as usual. You can’t control what happens in your staff members’ lives, but you can control how it affects their performance, and that is about transparency. When staff doesn’t feel the ability to let you know if something is wrong inside or outside of the practice, resentment can build. By creating a culture of open communication every single day, the amount of stored tension is dramatically reduced.
I show DCs a simple three-minute morning routine of questions for each staff member to create open communication. It lets the DC know what may be going on for staff outside of the practice, but without needing to fix it. And if issues inside the practice need to be addressed, then the DC now has the ability to fix it to bring the team closer together. Real, open communication between everyone in your practice creates an enviromnent for growth, ease, and increased results.
^ When staff doesn’t feel the ability to let you know if something is wrong inside or outside of the practice, resentment can build. 5 5
Showing up every day to an enviromnent based in healing should be enjoyable and stress-free. If the DC or staff isn’t experiencing that, then don’t count on your patients feeling that way either. And if patients don’t feel that way, don’t count on them referring or staying for the long run. Make it easier on yourself, your staff, and your patients by implementing these four principles while your practice grows at the same time.
References:
“The 48 Laws of Power” by Robert Greene Penguin Books Publisher, 1998
Dr. Josh Wagner shows DCs globally strategies for new patient care acceptance, retention and referral increase without using force, gimmicks, or ever feeling like a salesman. Initially frustrated by the low public ^ perception of Chiropractic perpetuated by practice management, Dr. Wagner now devotes his focus to changing this practice to practice. When he's not spending the majority of his time helping Chiropractors he 's most often found in the sun listening to 80s music. To see his best strategies visit www.perfectpatientfunnel.com.
