Whoever said “may you live in interesting times” sure is having a good laugh these days. The 2020’s have been a wild adventure so far! As business owners ourselves, we’ve seen firsthand how an environment filled with distractions, health challenges, burnout, inflation, scarcity and other complications makes it harder to run a business. And we know we’re not alone. Many of our clients are feeling pinch and having a harder time providing the high level of service that is essential for their success.
What Is Even Happening?
Besides being a question we ask ourselves almost daily, this is a great starting point to try to put some framework onto an often bewildering modern business climate where this and more could be facing your practice daily:
- Staff who have a hard time being as productive as they once were
- Wages and cost of living rising, while competition intensifies
- Vendors that don’t deliver on what they promised
- Customer service standards that have dropped off
- Ongoing questions about how and when to raise prices
- Patients needing much more communication and direction than before
- Patients being stressed and quicker to voice frustrations
We’re going to go out on a limb and say that at root, this all comes down to one simple fact: people just are not as productive and focused as they were before the pandemic, and they’re not likely to start applying their noses to the grindstone in earnest anytime again soon.
Armed with that perspective, how do you motivate your team, leverage technology, and satisfy your patients given a lower productivity environment?
Minimize Distractions
A good leader not only keeps their team busy – they also actively look for and kill off distractions and unnecessary work that lead to poor productivity, confusion and morale problems. But how to root out these pesky distractions?
Start by asking your staff members for a couple things they wish they could get off their plates. Chances are, these are taking an outsized amount of mental bandwidth and worry, even if not much is moving forward. From there, open up the discussion at a staff meeting about how work can be shifted around or even tabled given more important priorities. For instance, we’ve found that some practices have a staff member who loves social media, but many do not. If constantly coming up with content to feed the social media beast is a real chore for your office, take a look at our in-office social media assistant, who can seamlessly embed in your office to take this chore off your plate.
If you don’t already have your staff log their time, you may want to consider starting. Sure, it can be one more hassle for a busy team, but without specific insights into how they’re utilizing their time, you can’t spot areas begging for streamlining and process improvements. Time tracking can also help you see who is most efficient at certain tasks, and you can empower them to help your other team members cut through the clutter.
On the patient side, continue to ask your patients what you can do better in their eyes. For instance, in general, we think overcommunication with patients is a good thing. But you likely have patients who just shake their heads when they get that 3rd appointment reminder on their phone. Be open to being more flexible and customizing notifications in the way your patients want.
Inspire
Many of your staff and patients aren’t exactly primed for great news and positive vibes these days. Modern life can feel like playing a game of dodgeball with ginsu knives, and a lot of people spend their time dreading the next problem that might come flying their way. It can be very challenging in such a landscape to motivate and inspire the people around you, but you gotta do it to run a thriving practice.
Here are just a few ideas on how to be an inspiration and keep the positive vibes flowing in your office in spite of the negativity that keeps trying to creep in everywhere:
- Solicit ideas for team events outside the office where you can give back to the community.
- Highlight patient successes and kudos in your staff meetings.
- Share a challenge you’ve had personally or professionally and how you got creative to solve it.
- Publicly praise any staff members who go above and beyond to help out.
- Acknowledge that your team members may have more stress than ever on a personal level, and ask how you can help.
- Plan something fun “just because” with your team, like cutting out early some day to meet up at a local event.
- Always explain the “why” of what you are asking the team to do and allow them to be creative about how to achieve the goal.
- Where possible, allow flexibility in work schedules so that your team feels more in charge of their work/life balance.
Trust the Robots…to a Point
With all the talk about AI, you’d think it should be nearly effortless to automate almost everything your staff does. Well, it ain’t. Your practice manager, schedulers, treatment team and more are instrumental in your success, and we think it will be many more years before considerable parts of these high-touch roles become automated in a mainstream way.
But that doesn’t mean you should just stick with the status quo. Automation can help take the drudgery out of many routine tasks, improving staff engagement and their happiness with their work. Here are just a few productivity tools you might want to consider:
- Task Management: For smaller offices, Basecamp can work quite well to manage to do’s and bigger projects. Monday.com and ClickUp are also worth a look.
- Graphic Design: Canva, hands down. This design program makes it super easy to put together social media posts, office flyers, mailers and so much more.
- Password Management: We’ve used LastPass for many years and it’s been an excellent resource for password security, sharing, and management.
- Data Tracking: This one’s a bit more technical, but Microsoft Power BI can consolidate multiple data sources into a common dashboard. Say goodbye to dozens of cumbersome Excel sheets and get a better big picture view of critical data about your practice.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of productivity helpers, and we encourage you to ask your staff to keep an eye out for tools they think will be helpful for the practice.
On the patient side, anything you can do to make your process less onerous and make it easier for them to get services from you should be explored. Fully automated, online intake forms are a must have. And don’t be afraid to leverage text messaging well beyond the usual appointment reminders. For instance, you can set up automated campaigns to encourage patient referrals, or to alert patients about their spa membership reward status. Whenever approaching automation on the patient side, be sure to balance it with your existing processes and ensure that the high level of customer service you are offering remains intact.
