Understanding the flow of work and tracking it are absolutely essential for any clinic, as are getting the team to understand the commerciality of what they’re doing. After all, if they save 30 minutes each working day, over a year that will result in an extra two working weeks of time that can be filled with treatments!
Within any clinic you need to have dedicated roles, sometimes you can start to get cross overs, or people helping people out because it’s a five minute job for them to do it, but over time this will really start to hurt productivity so you have to keep people within the boundaries of their job. Also, play to people’s strengths. It’s not always obvious where people will really excel, so talking to your team and asking what they see their role becoming or if there’s anything they feel they’d prefer doing is well worth the conversation.
Give people ownership of certain clients or treatments as well. This will cut down on confusion from the clients side if they only deal with one or two people at most, it will also help the team member get a real feel for that treatment and enable them to become a real expert a lot quicker than if they were covering a few treatments or differing clients, thereby getting them to deliver better results more consistently.
Giving ownership will also empower the team to do better and make sure that you have only one person in charge of key roles, if you have more than one, it can lead to confusion and no one taking ownership. Being micro-managed has been shown to be detrimental to productivity, so when you delegate jobs be sure to tell your team members what the end result should look and feel like, then let them get on with it so that it also becomes a learning opportunity for them. This is by far one of the best ways of developing your team. There may be a few mistakes along the way, (non-treatment type) but as the saying goes, people who don’t make mistakes don’t do anything. Make sure, along with the ownership, you give them deadlines, and try and let them manage their own time.
There’s a great video by Daniel Pink about what motivates people, if you’ve not already seen it CLICK HERE
If you’ve only just started to grow your team, the one big lesson you have to learn – and fast – is that in a lot of cases, you’re probably really great at what you do and the people you bring on aren’t going to be as good as you at first. You’ll be tempted to either micro-manage things or, in some of the cases I’ve seen, even tempted to shrink your clinic again. Don’t! You have to let go and concentrate on putting systems in place to maintain high standards of delivery across the clinic. Look to get rid of all the jobs you’re doing – ultimately you want your business to be a commercial profitable enterprise that keeps paying you even if you walk away from it, don’t you?
One last thing on your team, make sure you define what 100% is for the role that someone holds, that way they have complete clarity on what they need to and if they’re not operating at 100%, what are the consequences? You could always get them to set out their own consequences when you do their performance review, that way when you sit down next time, it’s not you punishing them, as they’ve set out the consequences 🙂
By Alan Adams The Clinic Coach
