The Ingredients and Factors That Create Strong Medical Office Teams

“A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.” Take your pick of early 90s sports movies and you’re likely to hear this phrase uttered within the first half hour of the film.

Despite being a bit of a cliché, this message rings true, and it applies to more than just your favorite football team!

Your employees make up the backbone of your office. Speaking with and scheduling patients, receiving and filing payments, and managing the day-to-day – this is all so you can focus on what you do best: the medicine!

In a recent episode of the Growth-Driven Practice Series, we sat down with Eric Guy, MSW, LSW, and founder/Chief Victory Officer at Center for Victory to talk about the tools and techniques you can use to hire and inspire your medical staff.

Having worked with both individuals and organizations to unlock their personal and professional potential, Eric has formulated a strategic blueprint that enables you to manage more effectively and create a culture of peak performance.

In this article, we’ll focus on engagement and how to get more out of your team by setting the stage sooner in your hiring process.

Want to watch the webinar? Click here to view the video recording.
‍

Understanding why employees do what they do.

When you are able to fully engage your staff and create an environment that caters to their natural strengths, you don’t have to worry about the weakest link.  

Often when businesses and medical practices hear the word engagement they think of their patients. But this isn’t the same thing.

To truly unlock the potential of your team and your practice, you need to take a step back and look at the engagement level of your employees.

If you, as an employer, only look at the behavior (instead of engagement) of your employees, you risk misunderstanding the “why” – aka, the factors that are driving their engagement and ultimately, their success or failure.  
‍
‍

It helps to look at this as a “can” vs “will”.  

Can this person do the job? Most likely.

But will they truly be engaged and succeed in this job? Now that is a different question entirely.

Because when you measure the drives that create the needs that result in the behaviors, instead of simply measuring the behaviors, you gain insight into what engages this individual and (better yet) what doesn’t.
‍

What causes an employee to check out mentally or emotionally?

Before we can understand how to engage employees, we have to know what makes them check out.

Most individuals don’t come into a new job wanting to fail. They WANT to work vs have to work – but if you’re not careful, the tables can turn in the opposite direction and employees move over into the “have to” camp instead of the want they had when they first started.
‍

The four internal forces that affect a private medical practice

1. Job Fit: Is the employee able to meet the requirements of the job? And even more importantly, do they feel productive in this role? Like a well-made suit, the fit is essential.
2. Manager: We’ve all had managers we love, and some less so. Whether it’s style, personality, or just something you can’t put your finger on, the right manager makes a difference.
3. Team: Being a part of a well-functioning team is great. Being part of a dysfunctional team, not so much. When an employee feels they can’t rely on the very people meant to be supporting them, it’s a one-way ticket to disengagement.
4. Culture: Every company has a culture…it may be good…it may be bad. Your culture can make or break how engaged your employees feel in their specific role and in the company as a whole.
   ‍

Matching your people “ingredients” to your practice vision

First things first, in order to find the perfect employee, you have to know what you’re looking for.

But knowing what you’re looking for means you also have to know what you’re missing.

Think about it like this. You want to bake a cake, but you didn’t go to the store for supplies. Instead, you are forced to work with the hodgepodge of ingredients you happen to have in your cabinet. It just doesn’t work.

Successful practice owners recognize that talent is directly related to the ability to achieve the vision. They’re interconnected.  To grow your practice and meet your goals you need a solid support system, the right ingredients to get you that delicious end result.

3 questions to ask right now:

• What are we doing and why?
• What teams do we have in place to support that vision?
• What teams do we need?

By clearly defining your growth strategy and the teams you have in place currently, the gaps you need to fill become pretty glaring. And that’s exactly where you start your engagement strategy.

Looking for the full list of tips and tricks designed to optimize your team’s performance? Download the on-demand webinar Tools and Techniques to Better Hire and Lead Medical Staff today!

‍