In our earlier piece on giving the proper resources to the staff, we discussed training, technology and repetitions as tools to improve employee performance. Here, we dig deeper into training.
Obviously, training takes a number of forms and can be conveyed in a bunch of ways, but we will point out some useful techniques that we’ve seen used. Hopefully, you can use them to apply within your own practice. Here are some of our favorites:
Training videos
Of all the training tools out there, this tool has probably undergone the most dramatic reduction in price (to about zero) with the most advancement in ease-of-use and quality. Training videos are especially useful when you are dealing with staff turnover or are regularly upgrading things like software and services. You don’t need to get everyone in a room for a training session (which can be a pain to do) or have a key person spend less-than-productive time to teach a newbie how to login and enter a cash payment. Rather, each person can visit the video – either online or stored somewhere accessible – at his or her own convenience.
Here are a few specific ways to do this:
If you want to just talk to the staff about a situation or a new policy, you can use any computer with a camera to video yourself discussing the topic, possibly edit in iMovie and then upload that video to YouTube. Send your staff a link to the video. Free and done.
If you want to show someone your computer screen – extremely useful if you want to show them how to make certain entries into practice management system – use something like Quicktime that is also free and allows you to talk while tracking your screen. Quick edit in iMovie, upload to YouTube and send the link.
Or you could act out a scene to show an example of how to properly interact with patients. For this, first write up a quick script. Find a couple of people in the office to be “actors” who will act things out for you. Then, just whip out your video camera on your smartphone, video the episode and you know the rest.
Meetings
There are thousands upon thousands of articles about meetings. Have them. Don’t have them. Show up early. Show up late. Say this. Don’t say that. Wear this. Wear that. People far more qualified than I are in a position to discuss that. Rather, just note a few things about meetings.
Be organized. A meeting is not a session to complain about what makes people unhappy. Rather, there are a few topics to be covered. If someone has something on their mind, there’s another time for that.
Be brief. No one can sit through a marathon session and retain all of the information to be conveyed. Focus on a few key topics and be very clear in discussing those.
Be consistent. One of my personal pet peeves are organizations that have a strategy one day and drop that strategy the next day and then go back to the strategy the next week. Very few strategies or systems can be properly evaluated within the span of one day or even a week. Decide on your message and stick with it for a while. Refine as necessary.
One strategy a lot of people find effective is the morning huddle. Before the work day, give everyone some key issues to note and tips for more effective work then get into the workday. These last 10 minutes or so. Because of the brevity of these sessions, you need to keep the topics limited to important top-of-mind issues. So, you may not have a chance to discuss Ms. Finnerman’s problem with charging treatment to her Diner’s Club card, but you will have the opportunity to remind people to get insurance information from everyone.
Reminder notes
E-mails, text messages and even handwritten notes provide regular reminders and updates on what you are seeing. You can even get fancy with newer tools like Wunderlist, Evernote or something like that. It can be simple things like “remember that we are running 20% off on all root canals this week” or something more technically-oriented like keeping up with a code change with an important insurance carrier.
The key here is to not inundate people with reminders. If you are firing off multiple e-mails each day, the staff will either forget half of the things you write or simply tune you out. Like everything else in life, step back, decide what matters most and compose reminders based on that. In a number of practices, people have been conditioned to expect an e-mail on Tuesday mornings or a quick text at lunchtime. The point here is that people know it is coming and can look for the communication.
Paid training
Obviously, there are a lot of different options here, but at its core, you pay someone to come in to your office and train people on one or various topics. Of course, this is pretty basic stuff, but just two pieces of advice. First, before agreeing to anything, make sure you agree to what kind of training will happen and do not make it so narrowly defined that once the training is completed for topics a, b and c, the trainer refuses to accept questions on any other topic without more money.
Second, ensure that any training involves follow up sessions that allow you and your team to get answers to questions that will arise once the training has been put into practice.
Also, if someone offers you only 10 free minutes of consulting and training, please know that there are better options.
Of course, if you need help setting up training for any topic in your practice, please do not hesitate to contact us.
No comments:
Post a Comment