Effective staff leadership principles essential for practice image, performance

Recognizing how important staff is to your practice can help you deliver a quality experience for your patients.

Patients will often judge the quality of a practice, and even the surgeon’s abilities, on the friendliness, kindness and competency of the staff members they see during their visit.

The staff is a vital ingredient when it comes to delivering a quality experience in your practice, and there are several principles of effective staff leadership that can guide you in providing that experience.

Improve perceived quality

Even if your practice is providing quality care for your patients, they will not perceive it as such if they do not have a good experience with your staff members.

Patients think that if the staff is sloppy, the doctor works the same way, and if the staff is precise and friendly, then the doctor is well-trained and performs good surgery.

We not only want to have a quality practice, but also a good perceived quality. Establishing that image comes down to the staff.

Talk to your employees like people and realize that if we have their best interests at heart, they will have the best interest of your practice at heart. In a physician’s office, this should be easy because taking care of people’s health is something that most people feel good about. So we need to treat employees the way that we would want to be treated.

Staff retention

Think of your employees as volunteers. Sure, we pay them, but if they wanted to earn more money elsewhere, they could leave the practice. So they are volunteering to work with us because they like what we are doing. We need to treat them like volunteers and let them realize that the success of the practice has a lot to do with them.

It is important to keep good staff members because if you lose them you have to re-hire, and that can be an expensive endeavor. In fact, it costs, on average, more than $5,000 to lose a good employee and hire someone else because you lose wages training someone else and have decreased office efficiency during that time.

If you happen to lose a referral source or referral physician, that can cost a lot. Losing a good person can be expensive, and you want to avoid it if at all possible.

To retain good employees, you want to be a coach, not a taskmaster. We want to give our employees ownership. If they are doing a project their own way, they will be more inspired to do it, and that is better than being forced to do a task a certain way.

I heard of one doctor who said to his employees, “You’re paid to do as you’re told. Sit there and do it.”

I think that any manager has sometimes thought those words in his mind: “You’re paid to do it, just do it.” But we do not want any employee to just sit there and be paid to do just as he or she is told. Everyone is supposed to be thinking and feeling the situation. We are paid to think, to do, to get the goals of the practice in mind and to perform the duties necessary to achieve those goals.

Avoid micromanagement

We also want to be positive when speaking with our employees. One of the worst things we can do is if someone has put their heart and soul into a project, and we either ignore it or reprimand them. That pops their bubble.

In our offices, we can easily set up the cycle of fear. It often starts with micromanaging and trying to micromanage what the employee does. Instead of judging and saying, “Somebody messed up here. Who is it? Let’s get them,” we need to say, “There’s a problem here. Let’s figure out what happened. All of us are doing our best in this office. We’ve hired the best people available. We’re all human. We all make mistakes.”

That is how we avoid the cycle of fear.

Be approachable

Another thing to remember is that you want to encourage your employees to come to you with problems. And never shoot the messenger.

It takes a lot of courage to come to the boss with a problem. A lot of employees do not want to do this in the first place, so we have to encourage our employees to come to us when there are problems.

It is then important to congratulate them on coming to us, even if they are telling us in a way that is less than appropriate or if they are making us feel bad by bringing up the problem. Most problems do make us feel bad if we are the manager. We need to say, “Thank you for sticking your neck out to tell me about this problem.”

Then, if we can get them to think about what the solution is, say, “Do you have an idea what the solution might be?”

At that point we are really going forward because they are going to be helping us and on board with solving the problem.

Encourage feedback

Another way to pay value to employees is to encourage suggestions. Put a suggestion box in the office and give rewards to those who contribute suggestions.

If we have an office that needs to be shaken up a little bit, 360° reviews can be an interesting thing to do. I do not encourage this all the time, but if we need to really get some feedback, we as a manager or we as the doctor can motivate everyone to write a little review about us.

Make sure the review sheets are anonymous. If they think their job or pay is on the line, they are not going to participate. It is hard to tell your boss what you really think, but that input can be good and help us reflect on changes we may need to make for ourselves, even if the truth hurts.

Spend some time

Our employees know that we are the high-paid people in the office, whether we are the manager or the doctor. Our time is valuable, and if we spend some of that time with an employee, interested in her family or his children or something else, then that is valuable time spent, and they know that they have done a good job and that they are important to us.

By paying some of our time to an employee, we pay value to that employee and help him become a better employee.

What happens if the only time you meet with employees is because they are in trouble? To avoid a tense office, we need to meet with our employees when they are doing good things, not just when we think they are in trouble.

Rewards and compensation

When it comes to compensating our employees, we should realize that, according to studies, verbal praise means more to most people than a raise. We want people to be adequately paid, but verbal praise often means more to them than a raise.

Of course, we want to have our wages in line, and maybe a little better than average. If we need to save some money, a good way is to eliminate overtime. Sometimes good benefits can attract employees better than a higher wage, and they may also cost less for us.

Perhaps a small bonus when employees do not expect it can be helpful. Tell them, “Wow, you did a good job. Here is a bonus.”

You have to think through what you are doing with a rewards system and then try to stress the non-monetary rewards. Think about what employees need. Maybe they need some time off. They need a boss who cares and is willing to help them.

Finally, try to establish a sense of synergy in your office. Work together with the staff. Try to do things together, such as volunteer work in your community. You can rely on that camaraderie to reach your ultimate goal of providing quality service for your patients.

For more information:

• Gregory S. Brinton, MD, can be reached at Retina Associates of Utah, 1250 East 3900 South, Suite 410, Salt Lake City, UT 84124; 801-281-3030; fax: 801-281-3033; e-mail: gbrinton@pol.net.