The goal of The Practice Solution Magazine is to provide practice owners with practice management information that will assist them in achieving success.
Great service to your patients/clients is one of the most important factors required to build a successful and thriving practice. Under the heading of great service, you will find the following key components: convenience, communication, cost and quality, and the importance of your service as perceived by the patient/client.
It would be wonderful if employees never make mistakes and always do a perfect job. But we’re all human; on-the-job errors are part and parcel of working in a practice. That raises this question: What do you do when a staff member messes up and how do you correct them? Here are some suggestions on how to properly correct your staff.
You’ve worked hard all week; the office atmosphere is rife with discipline and brisk efficiency. The staff have been getting along with one another, and you are proud of the team spirit they’ve both individually and collectively demonstrated. In fact, your staff has almost read your mind and anticipated your every need.
It is very wise to have a bonus plan for staff in operation in your office. If you reward staff for increasing their production and the production of the practice, they will naturally want to continue o do that, and the whole staff will tend to operate much more as a team.
In structuring a bonus plan, the simpler you can make it for yourself and your staff, the better. Bear in mind that you want the staff working as a team and that there are several areas of concern.
Our research staff continues to find that embezzlement is an issue that is still prevalent in practices nationwide.
More than likely, you’ve heard the horror story about a colleague whose trusted employee embezzled money from his/her practice. To preclude this from happening to you, there are steps that you could take to minimize the risk of embezzlement.
We recommend that the following procedures become a part of your normal routine, as they will help to safeguard you from embezzlement.
Do you ever get to the end of the day and realize that you didn’t get half of the things done that you intended to get done?
Do you find yourself giving endless streams of orders and then having to spend time following up to make sure everything was really done?
Do you often have to redo work because it was not done correctly the first time by someone else?
Is scheduling a problem?
Managing time in a healthcare practice is an art. Unique problems arise because, as the doctor, your main priority is treating patients.
Since dealing with staff bickering and personality conflicts can be a major source of stress in an office, knowing how to deal with it can be extremely useful. When you let employee situations linger too long, bad things happen, and you can end up losing not only the problem employee but other good employees as well.
Dealing with staff can often be a confusing and complex subject. Certainly, if a staff member was overtly unwilling, refusing to do what was expected, gossiping, constantly complaining and so on, this is a staff member you wouldn’t tolerate. On the other hand, what a pleasant job it is to work with someone who does exemplary work, follows policies, requires little supervision and consistently pitches in to help. Clearly this is a staff member to treasure.
Knowing how to monitor and measure productivity objectively is the underlying secret of success for any practice or business. No doctor would decide on a treatment plan without properly examining a patient and performing whatever tests are necessary to determine the proper course of action.
Practice owners bring on new employees for a variety of reasons. Often, when practices are undergoing expansion in production and income, they require increased staffing. Or, due to poor past hiring procedures, practice owners find that they have to replace employees who are poor performers. There is a natural attrition rate as well when a staff member moves out of town, gets a higher-paying job, etc.
Many past Practice Solution articles have been written on numerous aspects of our successful hiring procedures, including testing, how to conduct proper interviews, how to weed out unqualified candidates, legally acceptable and unacceptable questions to ask, etc.