Aside from rent, your HR or human resources are often the biggest expense for a medical or allied health practice. They’re also your biggest asset and possess significant potential to support practice performance and growth.
When looking at your HR needs, it’s important to ensure ongoing coverage of all roles and tasks for your practice, including when people are on leave or moving on. Not having this cover presents a risk to viability and the service you can provide, resulting in considerable stress.
Additionally, you want to be sure that your decisions will stand you in good stead over the longer term. Planning your team then recruiting and promoting accordingly, will help avoid expensive or challenging to undo mistakes.
So, your effort in HR planning is well and truly worth it!
What are the common triggers for a review of your HR needs?
Most commonly you’ll review your HR needs when someone leaves the practice or is going on maternity leave. This is undoubtedly a time of need, but it’s reactive.
Other times that warrant a review include:
On the back of your strategic planning and decisions about new directions, service offerings and expansion.
If bookings are consistently full, indicating a need for more practitioners.
Your desire as the business owner/director/practice manager to divest yourself of specific tasks.
The decision that certain administration tasks are better brought in-house or sourced externally, with a view to optimising expenditure, efficiency and quality, things like bookkeeping, audio typing and marketing & promotion.
When service is impacted by peak workload at certain times of the day/week.
A review of pending team member availability changes, based on factors like students going on university placement, support of family, long service leave etc.
Where do you start?
Review your existing team, considering each member. What are their:
Strengths and weaknesses?
Training and development needs?
Wants and needs moving forward in terms of hours and availability?
Future aspirations?
Then, look at what additional/different resources you need, considering the points under ‘triggers’ above.
Consider, too, whether you have sufficient diversity across the team - factors like stage of life, role experience, ethnicity, gender, thinking styles, physical abilities and qualifications.
Work to objectively question your approach to date to covering your HR needs. For example, do team members really need to be full-time? Could different start and finish times be accommodated with some clever rostering? Do they need industry or role-specific experience when they start with you? Is there an opportunity to train someone and promote from within rather than recruiting? Can you split higher-level tasks amongst team members and give them more responsibility and development without them having to take on a full higher-level role? Could some hard-to-fill responsibilities be outsourced?
Based on all these factors, you can determine what your practice needs and the gaps – for now and into the future.
Does diversity matter?
Certainly, some practices we work with have a preference for their team members to fit a particular profile. There are many potential advantages, though, to thinking more broadly about the make-up of your team. Diversity can bring many benefits, like:
Secondary language skills and extended cultural understanding.
Skills and knowledge gained in more recent training.
Greater understanding of new and emerging patient groups.
Avoiding some internal cultural and coverage challenges that can arise when all team members are at the same stage of life.
Flexibility in availability.
Different ways of thinking and approaching tasks.
New ideas and challenging the status quo.
Of course, a more diverse workforce can also present some challenges. Still, these can be well mitigated by good induction, training and communication, as well as comprehensive manuals and documentation - supporting confidence in the team and consistency of service to all stakeholders.
Finally, remember that when recruiting or promoting internally, this should always be based on the best person for the job. A review of our HR articles, including successful recruitment and selection, will support such objective HR decision-making.
The Augmentum team provides a broad range of consultancy and management services, supporting healthcare business owners and decision-makers in many key areas, such as strategy development and action planning, building effective foundations and teams, keeping your finger on the pulse, and driving growth and success.
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