Are you and your team making the most of quieter times in your practice?
The periods of lockdown resulted in many practices having team member hours available to them, but not the usual work to fill these, or necessarily the usual work environment. Whilst we all hope not to be presented with lockdown again (!) there are regular and predictable quieter times in most practices. Perhaps school holidays, when clinicians are at conferences, or on sabbatical? These present excellent opportunities - with a bit of planning and co-ordination.
There are many reasons why utilising your team members well is even more important when their usual work is quiet. These include:
Keeping them engaged and contributing; important for their personal morale, as well as your organisational culture.
Making progress on those organisational projects that have been on the backburner.
After the quiet time ends, turning around a situation where your employees have been paid for not doing very much, can be really tough.
So, what sorts of things could you get the team working on?
In every organisation there are those tasks and projects that have been partially done or put to the side due to a lack of time. As well as tackling these tasks, the quiet time presents an opportunity to get things organised – aiming to come out the other side with a more streamlined organisation, plus the foundations laid for future growth. Some ideas include:
Further your Strategic Projects - map out the steps needed to attain the goals, including what order these need to be done in, who will do them and by when. If you don’t currently have a Strategic Plan, now is an ideal time to undertake this process.
Develop documentation - draft, review and provide to applicable team members the policies, procedures, templates and checklists needed for their role. These documents establish what is done and why, plus how they are done and the relevant responsibilities. Those at the ‘coal face’ are often best placed for writing working documents, particularly procedures and checklists. They’re also very capable of reviewing one another’s drafts and testing for gaps in application.
Create position descriptions, plus induction and onboarding checklists and documentation - team members can contribute ideas and lists to support the generation of these.
Review your website – a fresh set of eyes over the site will pick up gaps and inconsistencies, plus it’s a great time to generate or build on those FAQs.
Create or review employees’ Personal Development Plans (PDPs) – a really good way to keep them engaged and working towards things to be achieved for themselves and the organisation.
Generate client handouts, information sheets and marketing collateral (e.g. posters, flyers and other physical marketing pieces).
Undertake or run training - both less formal updates or refreshers on software and procedures, and more formal online courses in areas that will enhance performance of roles within the organisation.
To help generate more ideas, managers can ask themselves what areas of the day-to-day workflow generally work well? What can be put in place to reinforce these? And what problems and issues have been experienced over time? What would help to avoid these recurring in the future?
Some things to put in place to underpin your projects, include:
A plan of what you want to achieve.
Allocated people to co-ordinate the different projects and support team members to achieve the goals.
Online access for team members to a portion of the shared drive – secured by your IT providers, of course.
Scheduled online meetings to review where people are up to, share ideas and review content together.
A document management system to ensure version control of documents.
A plan for each team member as to what they’re working on and agreed timelines.
Initially it might feel like this is going to take extra work, however much of the work can be done by your team members. Plus, when the potential gains in employee contribution and morale are weighed up, plus the progress made on strategic projects, documentation etc, it can be an investment that reaps BIG rewards.
The team at Augmentum provides a broad range of consultancy services, including helping business owners and leaders to harness every opportunity for building greater stability and driving growth. Get in touch to find out more, or check out our website www.augmentum.com.au.
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