Have you ever found yourself desperate to build and maintain a positive culture? It's been proven that a strong company culture helps your employees to engage more effectively with your patients and boosts productivity within your practice. It all starts with building the foundation for your practice, identifying your core values, and hiring the right people to work for your practice. So, what are the key ingredients to building a phenomenal foundation?
MISSION - To set the foundation of your practice for building a 5 STAR Team, you must understand what your mission is. Your vision of the practice and the care you provide for your patients - you must understand what this is and then you must live by it.
Not sure how to develop a mission statement? Start by brainstorming with your group, words that define the value and issues that are important to you as a patient care team. Then assign someone on your team to create the first draft of your statement utilizing the defined values.
CORE VALUES - You need to identify the core values that will help guide you and your practice in the direction to success. Set expectations, set guidelines, and understand your role in leading your team to be able to meet these expectations.
By developing a mission, you have already set the core values that you and your team are focusing on within your practice. From here, set your expectations and guidelines based on those core values.
PEOPLE - Evaluate your people. Are your people able to exceed your expectations? Do they understand the mission of your practice and the vision you hold? To maintain a positive culture, you certainly need people that are going to be contributors to your practice and to your team.
If there is someone on your team who is underperforming or who may be considered "the bad egg" of the group, it may be time to part ways. Focus on your people who bring something to the table and who enlighten the atmosphere while adhering to your core values.
ENCOURAGE - You must encourage positivity and growth. Help guide your team members to be successful by supporting them and by providing them with the encouragement, tools, and resources necessary to succeed. When we encourage growth and invest in our teams, the return on investment is substantial.
Other ideas for building encouragement and maintaining a positive culture: team retreats and team-building activities; educational opportunities; staff compensation models that provide an incentive for reaching production goals and maintaining staff expenses.
COMMUNICATE - Effective communication is key when it comes to setting the foundational components of an excellent team. It is about more than just telling your employees what to do. It's also about the intention behind the message and actively listening to what your team has to say. Learning how to effectively communicate and teaching your employees the keys to effectively communicating, will speak volumes and prove beneficial.
Great opportunities for creating an environment with effective communication include the implementation of team huddles and weekly team meetings.
ACCOUNTABILITY - When we begin creating accountability within the workplace, we see positive changes and growth. Accountability not only holds you and your team accountable for actions, but it also helps to encourage us to do bigger and better things for our organization.
Creating accountability through leadership is something that all doctors and leaders could use training on. Even myself as a practice administrator and the provider I worked alongside would have benefitted greatly from additional insight on this. Reach out to Williams Group to review how to create accountability through leadership.
As a Practice Management Director and Executive Management Coach with Williams Group, I am passionate about discussing the endless opportunities available for owner doctors and practice administrators to build and maintain a positive culture within their organization. Setting the foundation is the key to begin building your 5 STAR team and to building and maintaining a positive culture. It's never too late to reset your foundations.