Pediatric Coding Alert

Also: learn how to extend the advice to remote workers.

No matter the size of your practice, someone on your team will experience feelings of apathy or burnout about their job at some point. How you, as a manager, recognize and navigate those feelings will affect everything from team morale to patient experience.

During AAPC’s HEALTHCON Regional Conference’s general session on apathy and burnout, our team of experts offered up advice to help you meet these issues head-on. Here are four tips you can take back to your practice.

Tip 1: Look for the Signs

Employees experiencing apathy and burnout probably aren’t going to schedule a meeting with a supervisor to alert them to what’s going on. Therefore, you’ll probably have to make a conscious effort to pay attention.

Apathy and burnout have overlapping signs and symptoms, but the experiences are different. “It’s important to determine how to recognize it faster and give that person a push in the right direction; but first you have to understand what it really means:

Are you at the point you are starting to lose interest in the way you do the work or quality of care?” said Jaci Kipreos, CPC, CPMA, CDEO, CEMC, CRC, COC, AAPC Approved Instructor, director of provider audit Services at Coker Group.

Apathy: This can be characterized as a loss of interest or enthusiasm, and in the context of healthcare, a lack of concern about patients or outcomes. While not contagious in a technical sense, an apathetic team member can negatively impact team morale.

Burnout: This can manifest as complete exhaustion due to overwork. It’s more severe and can sometimes be traced to working conditions. Burnout has tangible effects on the suffering person’s health — which can ripple out across the practice.

Tip 2: Know Your Team

Tip two is related to tip one, in that you can’t efficiently look for signs unless you really know your team. If your practice is large, you probably don’t personally know all your team members, but putting in the effort to make contact can go a long way. Sometimes, just recognizing the way a person carries themselves and interacts with you is enough. “For example, I’m a talker, and when I stop caring, I get quiet. Watch for those signs and figure out the trigger and how to help solve it. Where do you get support? Finding the root cause is important,” said Rhonda Buckholtz, CPC, CDEO, CPMA, CRC, CENTC, CGSC, COBGC, COPC, CPEDC, AAPC Approved Instructor, chief compliance officer at Vision Innovation Partners

Consider making a greater effort to establish greater familiarity with your team by initiating conversations and finding ways to acknowledge and outwardly value them. “Staffing is a challenge, but you have to do little things to support and celebrate folks. Small tokens like thank you notes, chocolates, etc., make a difference,” said MariaRita Genovese, MHA, CPC, who joined the session as an attendee.

Tip 3: Encourage Boundaries for Remote Workers

Although most healthcare personnel work with patients face to face, their support staff sometimes hold remote positions. Remote workers often face increasingly blurred boundaries because their worksite and home are one and the same. This blending of worlds can lead to more productivity for many people but more exhaustion as well. Work is always accessible and thus maybe difficult to ignore. Here are a few suggestions on how to do that:

Lead by example. Share with your team ways that you balance your work and personal life. Make sure you’re making an honest attempt to find balance and share that with the team.

Avoid overloading your “good workers.” Once someone has a reputation for being efficient and generally great at their job, it’s tempting to start relying on them more. Giving select workers more to do, even if it seems like they can handle the volume, can quickly lead to burnout.

Encourage team members to communicate. Your team should feel comfortable telling you when they feel they’ve been overloaded. If someone comes to you and says something like, “I don’t think I can take on this extra work, but I’m happy to show someone else how to do it.” take those requests seriously. When employees feel respected and listened to, that can go a long way in avoiding apathy and burnout.

Prioritize tasks: In order to help your workers navigate their workload, try to maintain your own awareness of the order in which projects should be tackled. Then, communicate that with your team members during periods of overwhelm.

Tip 4: Anticipate the Potential for Apathy and Burnout

It’s never too early to start getting to know your team, so when hiring candidates, try to screen utilizing personality assessments. Keep in mind that you can never truly predict what work environment or circumstances in an employee’s life outside the practice might contribute or cause apathy or burnout, but personality tests can be a great way to get to know what kinds of environments tend to make potential employees feel valued and productive.

Ultimately, it’s important to remember that life brings challenges that can affect peoples’ ability to juggle work tasks too, and anticipating those needs will also help your team tremendously. For example, a new parent might be utterly sleep deprived and still showing up for work every day, expending more effort than ever before, though their productivity might lag by some measures. Compassion toward an employee in such a phase of life — and the knowledge that it is, indeed, a phase — can go a long way toward employee loyalty and a redoubled effort to dive back in once things at home calm down.