This week, I am continuing my thoughts and compilation of techniques to foster employee morale. I stated nine motivational tools last week that can be used to help motivate employees and will pick up with number five this week.
Recognize Performance - Give your employees continual feedback, and remember not to only address them in times where they have erred. Remember to praise in public and criticize in private. Periodically, take individual time with employees to plan their professional development and improvement. Seek their input into how they can serve the practice better. We have just started a "Start Your Weekend Early" award in our practice. When co-workers recognize each other's actions that go above and beyond in patient service, service to the practice or service to each other, we allow that nominated employee to take off a Friday at lunch with pay, without charging it to their PTO. This has been met with great excitement and we have fostered employees trying to outdo each other in kindness and service.
Celebrate Success - Celebration boosts a team atmosphere in the workplace. Look for personal and unique ways to celebrate in your office. Do special lunches for children of employees who are graduating. Have employee cooking contests. Bring in special snacks on rough work days - hot chocolate in the winter, smoothies and ice cream in the summer. Celebrate months where you have significantly increased practice income, cut medical supply expenses, office expenses, celebrate getting better managed care contract reimbursement. Have "welcome to the practice" snacks/refreshments for new employees so everyone can meet their new co-workers. Celebrating things as an organization allows everyone to know that you value their contribution as a component of the practice being successful.
Offer Professional Development - Most people welcome the opportunity to improve themselves. Empower your employees to seek opportunities to learn new things that will help them in their career. Seek out training and seminars applicable to their background, aptitude and advancement interests. Keep a trained, updated staff and you will see their attitudes change about their value to the practice and their self worth.
Create Community - Employees who feel that they are a valuable part of the practice invest more time and effort in creating the practice's success. Some of us spend as much if not more time with our co-workers than we do our families. It is important to create a sense of belonging and community to all who make your practice work day to day. Each person plays an integral part and needs to know how they fit into the community. Not one "player" is more valuable than the other. We all have a part to play and we as a business couldn't succeed without that part being accomplished. Ways to create community are to celebrate birthdays, decorate for holidays, communicate empathy/sympathy for employee losses. These activities are usually best handled by a committee of volunteers and serving on these committees themselves helps to foster morale. We have formed a patient service committee in our practice that has at least one member from each group in our practice (nursing, billing, front, scheduling, etc.) This group meets every other month to discuss patient complaints and how they could have been handled differently, discuss patient praises and how to "shine" better in patient service and they also look at specific points of patient contact in the practice and analyze how to serve the patients better at each point. This has brought groups together in a team atmosphere and gives each person / group meaning to their ideas and input.
Last, and surely not least,
Have Fun! - We state it often around here, if we can't have fun, we don't want to play. Sometimes there are those owners and co-workers who mistake fun for being unprofessional, so be appropriate in the fun that is being enjoyed. Some ways to have fun together as a group are:
Pick a charity to support and perform fund / support drives
Have a weekend garage sale in the parking lot of the practice, or at some other location
Introduce goal based contests (Biggest loser, most books read, most miles walked/run/cycled, most money raised for charity, etc.)
Have a practice cookout and let the managers and owners cook and serve the employees
On nice days, try holding your staff meetings outside or away from work
Create game show style questions / formats for the boring annual training sessions that we all have to go through
To recap, we all need good morale in the workplace so that we can be productive and serve our patients well. Morale is a personal choice, just as much as the clothes we pick out to wear each day. We as leaders in our practice have to be responsible for fostering good morale in our employees. Eisenhower once said, "The best morale exists when you never hear the word mentioned. When you hear a lot of talk about it, it's usually lousy." Let your efforts to boost morale be actions and not merely words. Foster morale by your own example. To achieve higher morale in the workplace, communicate well, define expectations, set goals, treat employees with respect, recognize performance, celebrate success, offer professional development, create community, and most of all - HAVE FUN!