In a article posted yesterday on one of Silkin Management Group’s blog sites, which you can access here, I discussed how handling staff is, by survey, one of the areas that doctors need the most help with in their practice. In that blog I gave an example of a doctor running across the following scene:
You (the doctor) round the corner and overhear Jessica, your front office employee, saying to Julie, your assistant, “Omigod! You just have to see Brian! He’s sooooo totally hot! I gotta show you his Facebook page!” Then off they go to her computer and spend 10 minutes looking at Facebook and chatting.
What do you do?
First, you have to be sure which one is the bad apple. Although Jessica might be the one that seems to be distracting the staff, and she’s the one that garners many staff complaints, you better take a moment and examine the situation a bit more closely. Sometimes office appearances just aren’t what they seem. How do you measure a staff member’s worth? It’s easy to get thrown off by a friendly smile, a quick wit or worse, accept one excuse after the other when mistakes are made.
You might hear from various staff such things as, “We like Amy,” or “Bill is a great asset to the office.” Or maybe you hear, “Yvonne isn’t doing a good job. We don’t like her.” Or perhaps it’s, “Fred just doesn’t fit in around the office.” Possibly you go home and tell your spouse that the stress at the office is getting to you and wonder what is causing it. Or you might confide in a colleague. You go to seminars. You read the trade journals. You may even hear similar stories of woe. You just don’t know which way to turn. You don’t want to lose all your hair or take an early retirement. You consider firing the bunch of them, but that could be jumping from the proverbial frying pan into the fire.
If you had a tool for measuring the value of the work a staff member produces, you would be way ahead of the game. This is exactly what Silkin Management Group helps its clients with. The answer is having measurable metrics or statistics for every position in the office. Larry Silver, President of Silkin Management Group states, “The only way you can effectively manage your staff is to accurately judge their production and contribution to the practice. If you have exact statistics for each employee, then and only then, can you make correct, unbiased decisions.”
With such a system in place you might actually find that Jessica, the gal with “extra-curricular” activities during the work day, is your highest producer, and you find that she has generated the most income for the practice. Or you might find that grumpy Jean, does a great job on the phone with recall and reactivates many patients.
Conversely, once production can easily be seen in black and white, you might find that the “most popular” staff member, has the lowest productivity as measured by his/her statistics. And, in uncovering that employee, you have just found the staff member that is causing most of the trouble and wasting most of the time and money around the office.
Now what? You can either train, discipline or fire this person. But which route to take? Silkin Management Group has the answer to that too, but that is a subject for another day. For now, using correct statistics that properly show the productivity of the expected product from each job position, will take you a long way.
For more information about what we do at Silkin Management Group, how we help clients with staff and other practice management issues, visit our website at: silkinmanagementgroup.com. You can also contact us at: info@silkinmanagementgroup.com or call 800-695-0257.
Lyn Ribisi
Silkin Management Group
Appointment Coordinator