Practice Planning: Five Ways to Make Staff Management Easier in 2022!

For more than 20 years ExecTech has published its free, weekly “Tips and Ideas” articles to help practice owners with ideas on how to more successfully operate their practices and reach their goals.

One of the things that I've found in my three-plus decades of helping practice owners, is that while some people are reluctant to accept help in any form; successful people are willing to accept help and advice when it's offered by someone that they've found to be competent and reliable. And they use this help to achieve their goals.

Staff management problems produce more stress for more practice owners than any other practice-related situation. As a result, it's no surprise that one of the most frequent questions that we're asked by our readers is: “What are the most common mistakes in staff management?”

Here are the five most common mistakes that we've seen in staff management, and what you can do about them.

1) The most common mistake is a lack of effective performance reviews or waiting too long between reviews.

Many practice owners only conduct performance reviews with staff once a year and some never do performance reviews at all. Sometimes this happens because they're concerned about what their staff will say in the review, and sometimes it's because they don't know how to conduct a formal performance review. The best scenario is to have performance reviews with your staff every three months. I've been to a lot of practices where staff have told me that they were frustrated because they didn't know how they were doing and how they could improve, either because they'd never had a performance review or because their performance reviews were spaced so far apart.

A performance review, once you get the hang of it, shouldn't take more than about thirty minutes. And if you're doing them every three months they can take even less time than that. This is time well invested in the stability and performance of your practice. If you already have a format for doing performance reviews, great. We have a performance review format that we teach our clients that makes a comprehensive thirty minute review pretty easy to do. If you think that it'll take too much time to review your staff, try just reviewing one of them a week until you've reviewed everyone.

2) The second point is that many practices either have an out of date staff manual or they don't have one at all.

As a result, the “rules of the road” aren't known in the practice and this can make managing more difficult. Any organization that operates smoothly, operates based on agreements: What times to show up for work, patient privacy policies, sick leave, lateness, punctuality and attendance, and many other things. A staff manual establishes these agreements in writing and this results in smoother operation and fewer misunderstandings. If you already have a staff manual, make sure that it's legally up to date. If your staff manual is more than a year old, you should have your labor attorney check it for any updates that it needs. We have a staff manual that we give our clients and then we help them customize it to fit the needs of their practice.

3) The third most common mistake is that the practice owner doesn't set daily targets and monthly goals for the practice.

If you want to get from point A to point B, you need to know where point B is. Each position in the practice needs to be assigned targets based on these goals. This gives you a framework to use in managing the practice.

4) The fourth most common mistake is that practice owners hang onto the wrong employees too long.

Sometimes they hang onto them because they don't think they can find a replacement or they don't know how to effectively correct the person; or the practice owner is afraid of what the person might do in retaliation if they're terminated. We help our clients handle all of these points.

5) The fifth most common mistake is that practice owners don't track staff progress toward monthly goals on a daily basis.

In order to manage a practice, you have to know how it's doing. If you can't put your finger on practice progress on a daily basis, you won't be able to properly manage your team. There are ways to do this and they involve knowing what each team member's product is and how that product relates to your practice goals.

For more specific insight into how to put smoother staff management into your practice, fill out our Practice Management Analysis. It's a free, online service that you can fill out at your convenience. It takes about 20 minutes.

Go to our Practice Management Analysis, fill it out, and one of our consultants will get back to you to schedule a time to review it with you and make recommendations. There's no charge for this service. Unlike some consulting companies, this service is not set up to get you to buy something. It's a free service that we offer to healthcare professionals and it has helped hundreds of practice owners get a better handle on their practice.

Take our Practice Management Analysis and see what you find out!

Yours in success,

Mike Graves

Senior Consultant

ExecTech