Last week, we talked about the obvious…wasted time and wasted patients; two of the things that you should hold most dear in your life and business.
However, there is one that trumps both of these, because you can’t maximize either time or patients without this…or I should say them.
Your Team.
I believe I see more waste with team members, human potential and clinical talent than any other area of the practice.
Primarily because you multiply waste by whatever number of team members you have. This is just plain incompetent business.
If you have a piece of equipment you want to use it. Well (sorry for the analogy but it is really very relevant), when you have team members you should be utilizing them also.
Unfortunately, the piece of equipment is seen differently. It becomes obvious when the equipment is not being maximized but the team member often goes unnoticed until something happens; such as they become bored and quit or they make a mistake through lack of training, focus or discipline.
Or probably the most challenging thing is due to ineffective and inefficient team members (the responsibly of the owner / doctor by the way). You become very fat with overhead and payroll or you simply are missing out on so much profit and potential.
There are cases when practices are missing team members because you do not have enough to cover the flow of patients to secure treatment and maximize your practice capacity.
Usually though, we have many (maybe all) team members where they are being wasted – in time, talent, potential, responsibility or just overall financial investment.
The three biggest specific areas of waste when it comes to team members are usually:
First, there are Clinical Team Members who could be doing more.
They can’t make temporaries to satisfy you or quickly enough to be efficient or impressions or cleanings or pictures or or or or or the list goes on and on.
So often, we are wasting team members’ time or talents because they are not trained, whether it is your fault or theirs. If they can’t figure it out or step up and evolve then move on to someone else. If they are capable and someone hasn’t taken the time to do it – then fix it fast.
We are in a business of minutes as I pointed out last week – not just your minutes – theirs. Not just your time and space – every treatment room in the office, every procedure, lab, and any other tasks. If someone isn’t able to effectively perform then they are being wasted and they are resulting in a waste of other things as well.
It becomes a domino effect that ruins the doctor’s time productivity and dollars per hour potential; either because of too much doctor time and involvement or too much chair time and taking up space in the schedule.
Secondly, for the Administrative Team, the most common problem is someone trying to do too many things and therefore being wasted because no one thing is getting done completely or thoroughly.
There really isn’t any other explanation. You can’t say you have a great patient experience when someone waits to be greeted; or when someone has to be put on hold; or when someone is exiting and trying to pay and waiting for you to finish a phone call; or or or the list goes on.
If any one responsibility is not being done completely every day, start to finish, beginning to end, then someone is being wasted or overworked – the person’s potential is squandered.
It is also important to note that many team members are wasted because they are doing things they are not good at and therefore they are not going to perform at a level that is going to drive growth in your practice.
Finally, the other aspect of team waste is in poor communication or transfer of information from one person/department to the next. The result is lost treatment, confused patients, lots of overlap of effort and gaps in the business overall.
Your homework on how to fix all of this can be done in four steps:
1st – Make a list of what you believe every team member should be doing and what a result is for them to be held accountable.
2nd – Have a brief conversation with them about what takes up the most of their time, what they enjoy (or don’t enjoy) doing and wish they could do more of or less of and then compare notes with item #1.
3rd – Bring everyone together and have each person explain their #1 and #2, and what they see their role as going forward to ensure they will not be wasted. This provides clarity of each person’s involvement and responsibilities.
4th – Publicly go through how each team member is connected to the performance of the practice, the financial growth, the patient experience and the patient outcomes; then discuss the proper way to be an effective and supporting team member for everyone else to be able to perform at the highest level.
This will be a transformational exercise if you will do it. It will blow your minds with how amazing your team will succeed and how focus will drive their cohesive efforts to your goals.
Then you’ll be ready for the next one, it all comes down to this.
Next week, in part 3 we’ll tackle the 4th area and opportunity: wasted money.
I believe you have some conversation, training and maximization to get to work on…
