Reducing Staff Turnover: 5 Things to Avoid

Let’s get right into my top pieces of advice for reducing staff turnover. There’s so much more to this subject, but these five core principles guide everything.

1. Holding on to a Poor Fit for Too Long

Counterintuitively, trying too hard to hold onto employees can actually create more turnover. There’s no way to really know upfront if someone will fit your practice like a glove. It takes bringing them on board and throwing them into the daily stressors of the job to truly know whether they will work.

But you can usually tell within a couple of weeks if this person is a good fit. This is all the time it takes to decide; if they are not the right person, let them go to find a new position where they will be happier. Then find the right person who will thrive in your practice..

If you wait for months (or worse, years), you’re not doing anyone any favors. You may think keeping them on is being kind, but you’re doing a disservice to everyone. The longer you wait, the more valuable time and energy you’ll waste trying to transform an underperforming employee.

As an employee, it’s honestly better to know and move on quickly before they’ve built a whole life around the practice. Getting settled, comfortable and reliant on the job, and then having to hunt for a job from scratch, is challenging.

2. Not Providing Your Staff With Well-Planned Training

Employee success starts with staff knowing exactly what is needed and wanted from them. If you aren’t clear from the start, they’re going to act on their own ideas of what they should be doing or how to do it. And that usually doesn’t work well for anyone.

This comes down to having good systems and good leadership. The person could be the brightest, most experienced star, but no matter how great they are, you probably do things differently in your practice than everywhere they’ve been before. You wouldn’t expect a student to know how to ace a test they’d never studied for; neither should you expect a new employee to know how things are done at your office and the exact specifics of your processes.

By having clearly outlined writeups for every position, you create consistency and empower staff to excel. These job hats should include: the general duties of the job, statistics performance will be measured by, valuable product(s) they should be producing, standard operating procedures to follow to accomplish products, and any peculiarities and exceptions.

3. Failing to Give Ongoing Guidance to Improve Staff Performance

How long did it take you to become the amazing doctor you are today? Did you graduate with the same expertise and finesse you have today? Or did you slowly gain more and more skills as you encountered new challenges, worked with new techniques and therapies, and learned from those with more experience than you?

Now look at your staff: where is the most turnover in your practice? Usually it’s the front desk, which is often one of the doctor’s biggest problems. Why? Well they’re generally in their own bubble, disconnected from the rest of the team, without much active supervision. The back office is where most doctors live, as they are constantly working with the treatment team. Often the disconnection between these teams can make them feel like totally separate groups.

If you don’t actively lead and guide your entire team, guess what? They’re going to do their own thing and make their own choices! You need to be active in their daily lives, checking in on them, seeing what problems or challenges they are running into and helping them solve them. Keep your team together, not separate.

4. Allowing a Bad Apple to Remain in Your Group

When someone isn’t performing, has a bad attitude or disagreements toward their job, other teammates have a few choices in how they respond: a) agree and act the same; b) be frustrated because they’re working hard and this other person is causing problems or not producing; or c) decide they don’t want to be in that environment and quit.

This is the road to an unproductive group and staff drama. If you keep a bad apple, they will drive away your good staff. So confront them, give them the opportunity to change, and act to release them if they won’t. Don’t destroy your entire practice with one bad apple.

5. Failing to Create Careers That Inspire Staff to Grow

Good people want to grow and advance. They want to be motivated and improve their condition in life. Even if someone is starting at an entry-level position, you never know when you’ll uncover a diamond in the rough; someone who just needs some polishing to shine. Here are a few tips to create passion-inspiring careers:

a. Incentivize high performance with a good bonus plan. It’s a win-win for you and the team.

b. Transform the corporate mission and core values no one follows into something real that is lived in your daily activities. Chiropractic is filled with passionate people who want to help transform lives and help people become healthy. You have a vision and passion for your practice. Let your staff share and contribute to it.

Identify 3-5 core values that can be measured against action. Talk about them in all of your staff meetings, use them in your performance evaluations and to advance high performers. You’ll see a fire in your staff like never before.

c. Give team members the opportunity to move up. As your practice grows, encourage employees to step into new roles, and promote from within. If you do the previous step (b) well, you will have plenty of great staff to advance.