With staffing costs being one the biggest expenses for your practice, are you getting the maximum return for the money you’re spending?
We’re not talking about whether you’re paying people too much here, but whether you’re utilising your human resources (HR) optimally and for the highest benefit – for the practice and for them as individuals.
There are lots of strategies you can put in place to optimise HR utilisation. And the great thing is that putting these into practice often drives even greater engagement and motivation from your team.
First, do a review of your team members
There are the surface things, like how long they’ve been with you, their hours and the tasks they generally perform. Then do a deeper dive into each team member and identify:
Their key strengths.
The things about their job that really interest and engage them.
Previous suggestions they’ve made for improvements.
Find out what other skills could be harnessed
Get this information from sources like:
Peer feedback and suggestions.
Their resume (it’s amazing the things you don’t remember when someone’s been with you for a while).
Ask them about the things they like doing outside work. What are they passionate about?
Your teams last (or next) performance reviews also present a great resource/opportunity to see where they:
Think more training would help them.
Could improve on the service they provide to people inside or outside the organisation.
See opportunities for the business generally.
Could share knowledge they have with the rest of the team – it might be clinical, customer service, specific to the medical software etc.
The things they come up with will often be areas in which they’d love to work on a project themselves. With your support they’ll be able to generate efficiencies and improvements, plus potentially develop the business in ways that extend well beyond the immediate role they’ve been doing.
Look at the practice roles overall and team performance
To capitalise on opportunities, we suggest you:
Look into the feedback you receive at team meetings. Is the team perhaps really busy on specific days/times and in need of support to provide better service?
Review when tasks are being done. Maybe there are things that don’t really need to be done on a Monday morning (when your phones are going crazy) for example and could be done by the team member covering Saturday mornings?
Investigate whether you could tweak shift times a bit to create more overlap in the busy periods.
Review whether there’s a better physical set up in their area to decrease unnecessary action.
Check if there is equipment that’s slowing them down and could be updated. Or maybe there’s software that would make them more efficient – like apps where you schedule your social media posts, or systems to maintain and systematise your documentation.
Get your medical software provider to spend a little time in your practice and suggest additional functionality you could be using/things you could be doing differently/more efficiently.
Incentivise them
For an incentive to be effective, it needs to be based on elements of the business that the team member can control. Depending on their roles, many team members don’t have the opportunity to directly influence things like income and other KPIs. But their actions might impact expenses, plus clinician and patient satisfaction surveys can be a great objective measure to tie rewards to.
Incentives can include things like bonuses etc, but what about funding special team social events, contributing to their favourite charity and extra training in areas they’re interested in?
Ask for suggestions from each team member and be clear about the actions and outcomes that will result in the rewards.
It’s just the beginning
Once you get the team on a roll and they know you’re open to and will action suggestions (or empower them to!), you’ll find the ideas will start to flow in!
You might also find some of our downloadable resources helpful through this process, including the position description template and the sample performance review questions, both of which are linked to articles to help you through these HR management jobs.
Together you’ll build efficiencies, utilisation and morale, as well as drive accountability – all of which leads to a happier and stronger team, and great service to your patients!
We also have a some related articles where you can get more ideas – checkout HR Utilisation & Engagement - especially in quieter times, Performance Reviews Make Me Nervous and for a dive into maximising utilisation of your practice resources generally - Squeezing the Maximum from What You’ve Got. Or you can see our full range of articles here.
At Augmentum we provide a broad range of consultancy services, supporting healthcare business owners and decision makers in other 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. Get in touch to find out more, or check out our website www.augmentum.com.au
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