I cover a lot of ground in this blog, from leadership to execution, from theory to practical advice, all focused on helping you keep your O&P business thriving. I talked about The Great Resignation before the national news picked up on it, and lately it seems I’ve been focused on making lemonade out of lemons. There are a lot of lemons these days, so when a new recipe for lemonade came up, I had to try it.
There was an article on February 22 in The Wall Street Journal titled “The Way to Stop Workers From Quitting” by Anthony Klotz. It starts out with the statement that “resignations can be contagious.” If you have been in the business world for more than a few years, you probably can bear witness to that statement. The article goes on to describe a powerful way to help mitigate the impact of a staff departure. It’s something I had never heard of in all my years, nor have I knowingly participated in it.
After reading the article I reached out to a friend of mine in the HR world. I couldn’t wait to share the great new concept with them. I excitedly went through my whole presentation, and they said, “Yeah, we do that.” Like so many things we discover, what is new to us may not be new to someone else. So even though I was a little bummed that I could not enlighten my HR friend, it made me realize once again the power that is in community. So as a community, we are all together much smarter than any one of us.
Our community of O&P business leaders has “discovered” many great things that have value across all practice sizes. One of the most powerful things our community found that you can do to help your practice run more smoothly is to implement a weekly admin-practitioner work-in-progress review. This meeting highlights those patients that are most in need of your services that week and makes sure everything is ready for them. What the community of HR people has learned is that it is important to identify those employees or the issues that need your attention. I am not suggesting a weekly one-on-one, but what the experts are recommending is a “stay interview.”
We’ve probably all heard of an exit interview, where you get to tell the company all the bad stuff as you walk out the door. But in a stay interview, according to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), managers seek “to understand why employees stay and what might cause them to leave.” At the end of the day, this comes down to all the things we talk about, a strong culture that is aligned to a clearly articulated vision and mission and employees who hold similar values. The SHRM website includes a list of Stay Interview questions that you might find helpful.
Take a look, try it out, and let me know your thoughts!
