What do your employees need from you?

As you know, one of your greatest assets is your team. Your team creates your brand and impacts your reputation. They can make the difference between a positive patient experience or a negative one.

A great way to build a cohesive and loyal team that functions optimally is knowing what their goals are, what motivates them and what they need from you to perform at their best. This is important whether the size of your team is less than ten or more than 100. I have managed both size groups and firmly believe this to be true.

I work with some practices that have multiple offices and quite a bit of staff, the bottom line is that this is what you need to do for your employees in order to have them happy, experience less turnover and strive to do their best.

When I was in graduate school, we were assigned to develop our own model of nursing. My model was a human eye with the patient at the very center for the ‘pupil’. The iris was our employees and beyond that was administration and the environment. As a budding administrator in a leadership position, I proposed (and believe) my job was to support our team with the best training and resources so they could perform at an optimal level.

These resources included equipment, training and whatever they needed to succeed. What I have learned over time in managing large and small groups and working with many various practices across the United States is that no matter the size of your team, there are some core things beyond resources and training, which are critical for success. These include understanding the core values of your team members, creating a supportive relationship and a embracing a results-oriented mindset.

To do this, your team needs to understand your vision. They need to know your story and sense your energy. Even if you are in a large health system, there is still usually a story surrounding how that product line came to be and the story behind the physicians leading the cause.

Your team also needs to experience predictable expectations (consistency) along with a sense of fairness. Fortunately, systems (which I talk about a lot) help to create predictability and reinforces fairness. With systems in place, your team and your patients are better able to create predictability because they better understand expectations and the path to success.

Coincidentally, this also improves satisfaction and reduces team turnover. Thus, if you focus on your vision, your energy and your story first, then consistency and fairness, you will have a strong foundation for the next steps. After this, your team likely needs a challenge as well as understand how they fit into the big picture. This helps them excel and eases your workload. Delegation can be hard but with clear expectations and documented systems, it becomes easy to do!

You may think that your team doesn’t really want a challenge. However, more often than not, I find that they embrace a challenge. For a specific challenge for them creates a higher degree of ownership and commitment to you, your patients and your practice.

Finally, your team needs to know that you genuinely care about them and their contributions. Having said that, I don’t mean coming in and saying “How are you?” as you’re walking by and not even pausing to hear what they say. It’s a matter of pausing to listen so they feel how much you care about them, their goals and what makes them ‘tick’.

If you have a large team, this can be difficult. However, if it becomes your culture, each manager/supervisor can do this with their team members.

As icing on the cake, you can bring it all home if you know what motivates each employee. You can find this out in a variety of way. You can have a 1:1 conversation, you can use a tool, such as an Enneagram, or a combination of both.

You may believe all people care about is money. And money is an important thing and it needs to be managed fairly. But for many (most in my experience), other things motivate them even more than money. Things like a new challenge, praise for a job well done, or a simple note recognizing them for their effort.

In summary, these are a few things your employees need the most. Address them and watch the magic happen!

We cover this in detail in membership. You can check it out at www.BariatricBusinessBoss.com or simply e-mail me to explore your thoughts and your particular goals for recognizing and growing your awesome team – [email protected]