I was reading Allison Pohle’s reporting in the Wall Street Journal about The Gund Co., a family-owned manufacturer that puts employee well-being at the center of its management approach while maintaining high-performance expectations. What caught my attention was the practical detail she mentioned: Employees have a way to flag concerns, and career development plans extend from the factory floor to management.
What’s this got to do with running an O&P practice? I think quite a bit. We work in a profession built around taking care of people. Extending that commitment to employees makes sense. The harder question is what it looks like on a Tuesday when two people are out, a delivery is behind schedule, and the phones will not stop ringing.
I suspect most of us can describe how much we value our employees more easily than we can describe what we changed after the last concern they brought us. We know their families. We appreciate the extra effort. We thank the person who stays late to straighten out the schedule. Those things matter. But consider the patient care coordinator who spends Friday afternoon rescheduling deliveries because fabrication delays never made it from the bench to the appointment calendar. Suppose the technician knew on Tuesday that the work would be late, but nobody had clear responsibility for communicating the revised completion date. By Friday, the coordinator is apologizing, the practitioner has a hole in the schedule, and the patient has arranged transportation for an appointment that cannot happen.
Everyone is doing their best with the information they have. The handoff is still failing.
My first question would be where that information stopped and who needed it next. You already understand this kind of investigation clinically. If a patient keeps compensating for a poor fit, you look for what is driving the compensation. I think we owe employees the same curiosity about the work we ask them to do. The front desk keeps rearranging appointments. The technician keeps interrupting fabrication to answer status questions. The practitioner keeps rebuilding the day’s plan. The billing team keeps waiting for the completed delivery documentation. Any one of those may be unavoidable on a particular day. When the same disruption returns every week, I would bring the people involved together and agree on who reports a changed completion date, who reviews the affected appointments, and who contacts the patient. Then I would check the following Friday to see whether it helped.
Appreciation matters more when it comes with a change people can actually feel.
The same reasoning applies to employee development. I like asking people what they want to learn, but the answer creates a responsibility for us. Suppose an experienced front-office employee wants to learn authorization follow-up from the billing team. That could give the employee a useful new skill and give you better coverage when someone is away. It also requires someone to teach, time to practice, and an agreement about when the employee is ready to handle the work independently. Who covers check-in and benefits verification during that training? What comes off the trainer’s workload? Without those decisions, we can turn an opportunity into two people trying to fit more work into an already full day. You may have to defer the request. I would rather explain what needs to happen before training can begin than offer an enthusiastic yes that never becomes time on the calendar.
Your first reaction might be that all of this sounds fine when you have enough people. Fair enough. In a small office, the person covering the gap may be you. I am not suggesting that every concern requires another hire or that every employee request deserves approval. I am suggesting that we account for the work before we commit people to doing it. Opening another afternoon of appointments creates more than appointment slots. It also creates documentation, fabrication coordination, and follow-up. You need to know where those responsibilities will fit. I would look at three questions together:
- Can the team handle the work reliably?
- Will patients get the attention they need?
- Will the revenue support the cost of doing it well?
Payroll, training, and dependable coverage all require a financially healthy business. Caring about employees includes protecting the business that employs them.
It also includes dealing with performance problems. The Journal’s reporting makes clear that Gund’s commitment to avoiding layoffs does not mean keeping everyone regardless of performance. I think that distinction belongs in any conversation about putting people first.
When a practitioner repeatedly leaves documentation unfinished, the billing team has to chase it. Another practitioner may struggle to answer a patient’s question. The next step in care may wait. Our reluctance to have the conversation leaves other people carrying the consequences. I would start with the specific expectation and what is happening instead, then determine whether the problem is capacity, training, an unclear process, or a failure to follow through. Agree on the correction and a review date. Give the person a fair chance to improve, and return when you said you would. If the problem continues, the rest of the team deserves action too.
I would keep the first step small enough to finish this week. Pick one recurring frustration and ask the people handling it what happens, what they have already tried, and what they recommend. They have a responsibility to help solve the problem, and you have a responsibility to make a decision.
Choose one change, name the person responsible, and put a review date on the calendar. If the answer to an employee request is no, explain why. If you need to investigate, say when you will return with an answer. We lose credibility when a reasonable concern disappears into a conversation nobody remembers having. A modest commitment kept is something employees can build on.
When I think about people-first leadership, I come back to the employee who has already told us where the work gets difficult. That person has given us something useful: a chance to examine a problem before it becomes another resignation, delayed delivery, or Friday afternoon of apologies. You do not need to adopt a manufacturer’s management program to act on it. Think about the last concern an employee brought you. What did you do with it, and does that person know?
Scott Williamson, MBA, CAE (ret), is the president of Quality Outcomes and the executive director of customer experience for OPIE Software. He can be contacted at scott.williamson@opiesoftware.com.
