Practice Management Alert

Asking your staff for feedback and really listening can make a huge difference in productivity.

As a practice manager, you may feel overwhelmed with the sheer number and variety of tasks you must accomplish to keep all of your employees and your practice on track. But if you're not investing your time in your staff, you may be missing out on opportunities to better their performance and your practice.

Incorporate these suggestions into your personal schedule and your practice culture, and watch how employees respond and your practice thrives.

Facilitate Quality Meetings

Look at your personal work calendar: is it filled with meetings? Do they seem like a waste of time? Before you balk at adding another meeting to your schedule, think about how much your team can benefit from all being in the same place at the same time. Scheduling and hosting the right kind of staff meeting can go a long way in team cohesion, as well as provide a time and space to get everyone on the same page.

Top tip: Consider providing some kind of treat to further incentivize attendance and participation.

With healthcare rules and regulations often changing, staff meetings can provide an ideal moment to make announcements about changes and updates, as well as give and receive feedback. If your practice experiences turnover, you can use this time to make sure your clinicians and the rest of your staff at least know each other's names and roles within your practice. Low-stakes interactions like this can increase familiarity and trust within your team.

At monthly staff meetings, you can provide - and request - feedback. Recognize the employees who are excelling in their roles, and ask for honest feedback on what you and colleagues in other leadership positions can do to serve your team better.

Invest in 121s

Regardless of the size of your team, it's worth your time to meet with each staff member one on one.

Hearing what's working or not working directly from your team members means addressing issues and finding solutions sooner.

Making time to meet with each employee one on one - and asking for feedback and genuinely listening - is a boon to any practice, says Blake Ortego, practice administrator at Cardiovascular Institute of the South in Opelousas, Louisiana.

Employees on the ground have a much better sense of a practice's strengths and weaknesses than management, and when staff feel like their manager has their back, they're much more likely to be candid with management on pointing out places where everyone can improve.

Top tip: Set up a box or bucket in the break area so employees can provide anonymous feedback, too.

Overcommunicate Expectations

In a busy practice, there's no such thing as overcommunication. This principle runs the gamut in interactions from being honest to staff that not all vacation requests can be accommodated, especially if team members want to take off the same days, to keeping the patients in the waiting room informed of any delays. This last point can be a crucial staff practice for specialty offices where a clinician may be called into a last-minute surgery or other emergency. In this context, especially, overcommunication and transparency engenders patient trust and provides your practice with more credibility.

Encourage Staff Participation in Change

When your office needs to roll out changes that affect staff directly, it's important to get staff feedback - and ideally, their participation - in crafting the new policies or practices. When asked for input, team members will be honest about what will work on the ground, as well as what they can adhere to without feeling like their privacy or autonomy is violated.

Consider a Patient Advisory Committee

With the reality of abrupt and constant change in healthcare, your patients may feel like they're struggling to make sense of how different rules, regulations, or even your practice's move toward more technology play into their experience at your practice. Consider putting together a patient advisory committee to increase communication and help your staff better anticipate how changes will affect patients. Having an established space for relationship and a formal route for honest feedback will help tremendously in better accommodating patients' expectations and needs.

Steal this idea: Every day, Ortego's front desk team combs the next day's appointment schedule for any patients with birthdays, and then sends a birthday card around the practice for all team members to sign. As the lines between the delivery of medical care and customer service blur, thoughtful actions like this could be the unique gesture that secures a patient's commitment to your practice.