Only 18% of organizations say their leaders are “very effective” at meeting business goals. This stat alludes to a larger picture of leaders either not fully understanding their business or their team members. Small, medium and large businesses alike all share similar requirements for effective management because no matter how great your team members are, they must be organized, informed and all contribute to the greater good of the business. In this article, we’ll provide three important steps to improving your practice’s management and success.
3 Steps to Successful Optometric Management
1. Set and Analyze Specific Goals
The importance of specific goals cannot be overstated. Whether your practice is small or large, specific goals will streamline your practice and organize your teams. Once specific goals are set and known by all team members, you must track and analyze your practice’s efforts to reach them on a regular basis.
After setting goals for your practice, don’t be afraid to adjust them accordingly.
If you are surpassing your goals, have a team meeting to congratulate your team then reach higher! Alternatively, if you are consistently missing the goals you’ve set, have a meeting and use it as a learning experience to determine what barriers are holding you back and how you can address them.
Optometrists often get caught up in the day-to-day needs of patient care and practice administration so if you can spend some time actually analyzing what is happening you can achieve far more than if you’re playing catch-up or simply hoping for the best.
2. Extensively Train Your Staff
Even with a highly trained staff, eventually procedures, ideas and best practices will become outdated. You must always train and retrain your team members on particular tasks and do this often. It’s not enough to cover a topic once or twice and assume your team will stay-up-to-date on their own.
As a leader, manager or owner of a practice you must organize, encourage and partake in regular trainings and additional learning opportunities. Even if your team is highly capable in their own ways, consistency and uniformed procedures are best for your practice and for patient care. With regular and thorough training, each team member will be fully informed and confident in their abilities, sharing this confidence, professionalism and expertise to your patients.
3. Create a Thorough Procedural Manual
Along with providing regular and thorough training, providing your team with manuals and how-to documents is a great and cost-effective way of keeping everyone on the same page and informed!
Additionally, have you ever had a staff member go on a last-minute vacation or perhaps leave your practice abruptly then realize they’re the only team member that knows how to do something? This opens your practice up to extreme risk and could cause significant delays or mistakes.
A thorough procedural manual outlines how staff members should complete each task in your office, no matter how simple. This will help other staff members remember what to do in the absence of a key staff member and will help your practice run more smoothly, efficiently and with significantly less risk.
Summarizing Optometry Practice Management
In addition to the steps listed above that you can take to more effectively manage your practice, we also highly suggest cross-learning with other practices as well as harnessing new programs and software to better organize your practice and patient information. Both of these suggestions are covered extensively in PECAA’s membership subscription. Further, PECAA can connect you with professional optometry consultants to be sure your practice is following best practices and procedures. If you’re interested to learn other ways PECAA can help you enhance your practice, reach out to us today!
