In a time where medical practices and hospitals continue to experience staff shortages, it is more important than ever to cultivate and embrace your team. Leading an engaged, productive, and happy team is a hallmark of a successful medical office manager. It's also one of the biggest practice management challenges. So where do you begin? Read on for some tips to lead a great medical office team.
7 Ways to Motivate Your Medical Office Staff
One of the biggest medical office leadership challenges is leading an engaged, productive, and happy team. You work hard to recruit and train them, but that's just the beginning of the journey. The linchpin of successful practice management is retaining a great medical office team. But how do you keep good employees from jumping ship? It's never foolproof, but not an insurmountable proposition. Here are seven quick tips to consider.
Spoiler alert: it boils down to building a culture of appreciation.
1. Recognize exceptional performance and giving credit where it is due, at the time it occurs rather than weeks or months later.
2. Keep employees informed about what is happening with the practice and how it might affect them. Don’t expect them to perform in a vacuum. Top-down communication is key.
3. Allow and encourage employees to have “downtime” each day. Good employees will work hard for eight hours, but a few minutes of downtime to take a break and step back is greatly appreciated.
4. Redesign jobs when necessary to keep employees from getting bored and losing interest. No one likes to perform the exact same tasks daily over long periods of time.
5. Offer opportunities for education and training. Whether it’s keeping abreast of new practice policies or professional development, it’s important to support your employees’ training needs. Your staff and practice will benefit in the long term.
6. Ask for feedback and input. Do you have any processes or protocols that need to be refreshed? Have any new policies that need to be implemented? Ask for feedback and seek input from your staff especially if any new changes will affect how they work.
7. Interact outside of work protocol. such as saying “hello” and “goodbye” when entering and leaving the office and asking how vacation went or how a sick family member is doing. This personal touch goes a long way.
Build Your Management Skills and earn CMOM Certification
In a time when practices are challenged with finding talented employees and holding on to their best staff, it is critical that a manager knows how to build and keep the best team for the practice to continue to be successful.
That’s why as a medical office manager, you must consider getting certified. With a CMOM certification, medical office managers gain expertise in personnel management, which includes learning effective strategies and practices for hiring and retention, with a section dedicated to maintaining valued employees.