Your staff is your greatest asset. You need them to keep your business going. Without them you would be drowning in work. They allow you to focus on doing what you love, but they can also sabotage your practice growth goals if not properly managed.
Meeting goals requires constant work in that direction. It’s imperative that you ensure your staff are working toward the same goals you are or you’re likely to stumble. Over our 40 years of researching, observing and troubleshooting, we’ve discovered that even the staff who appear the most loyal and dedicated to the practice can inadvertently sabotage your growth. We also know the best way to make sure your staff pulls the practice toward your goals is to make it worth their effort.
Incentivize Behavior Vital to Growth
Incentives are one of the most powerful techniques for guiding your staff to support your growth goals. If they are rewarded for adhering to policies that will result in practice growth, staff will not only meet your goals but exceed them by assisting you with self management. And why shouldn’t they? They have a concrete stake in it.
This works especially well for filling prime time hours, which staff usually don’t want to work. Despite our research findings that 88.8% of patients prefer early, late and weekend appointments, many staff members direct patients to normal business hours and then argue that there’s no demand for these “prime time” appointments, all so they don’t have to work after 5pm and weekends.
With proper incentive systems, appointing patients into prime time and working those hours is lucrative enough for staff to want to do it.
Basics of Incentive Success
There are many types of incentive systems, and the specific one you choose to implement depends on several factors. However, the one thing that all successful incentives have in common is simplicity. Can they be explained in 3 sentences or less? Can your team tell you how your current incentive structure works? If your employees, the people who need to work toward these goals, do not understand them, there’s no reward amount that will lead to success.
At chrisad, we know what makes incentive systems work, how to craft them to fit your practice specifically and how to implement them for success. Call us today for more information.