Do your employees enjoy coming to work and solving problems? Or are they like the 85% of employees nationwide who aren’t engaged at work, costing companies some $450 to $500 billion in lost productivity every year? HR is the best place to start improving the patient experience because that’s where the proverbial rubber meets the road. Those interactions between staff and patients can make or break your practice, regardless of any advertising or marketing you’re doing.
That’s why employee engagement is the new marketing.
For your medical practice, declining employee engagement means:
- Higher turnover
- Wasted time and money on replacement costs
- A shrinking bottom line
How Can You Invest in Your People?
Today’s most successful healthcare organizations go all out to achieve and maintain excellent patient satisfaction scores.
The financial rewards in achieving high patient satisfaction rates are clear: organizations delivering a “superior” customer experience attain net margins that are 50% higher than healthcare organizations that provide “average” customer service.
If you want to boost your patient satisfaction scores, try investing more resources and attention in your clinical and admin team members.
Research demonstrates that improving employee engagement can boost overall patient satisfaction. Enhancing your employee’s experience results in:
- Higher patient satisfaction
- Improved call center efficiency
- Reduced turnover
- A greater bottom line
According to Forbes, there’s a reason why companies who are named Best Place to Work see so much success. These organizations tend to have healthy, positive corporate cultures that help employees feel and perform their best at work.
Without a positive corporate culture, many employees struggle to find real value in their work, leading to increased turnover, misused resources, and not having capable staff to support doctors in the clinic (leading to subpar patient experience and fewer dollars in the pockets of physician
partners and leadership).
Does HR Really Make a Difference in Medical Practices?
We recently built and implemented a full, ongoing employee engagement program for a large orthopaedic practice that included 100 face-to-face interviews with their employees (click for a podcast recap detailing what we found).
The exercise has proven to be invaluable in terms of creating a positive workplace culture, improving communication flow between clinic and admin departments, and hearing from employees on the “frontlines” how we can improve the patient experience. Since then, we have expanded on the program and are implementing multiple, simultaneous programs with other practices.
And in what may be our biggest show of validation yet: the Executive Director of another large practice in Central Florida invited us to share our employee engagement insights with him at the Bones Society of Florida Annual Meeting in late 2019. You can find a full recap of the presentation right here.
Bottom line: maximizing employee engagement and satisfaction has a direct positive effect on your patients’ overall experience, employee productivity, and your bottom line.
Your patients are more likely to return to your practice if they’ve had a positive experience. Furthermore, patients today increasingly shop for healthcare services, seeking the best possible overall experience when they require care.