By: Michelle Jara, MBA, LSSGB

Do You Know Where Your Practice Stands?

If you are like any other Practice Owner or Manager, your day consists of an intense balancing act between pleasing your clients, supplying exceptional patient care, supporting your staff, and trying to find a break in the day from the madness. You spend your day continually putting out fires. Inevitably, your to-do list keeps growing and that production report you wanted to review gets placed on the back burner. All the practice goals and projects you wish to carry out remain unfinished quarter after quarter. Sound familiar? You are not alone.

Unfortunately, this is an all too familiar scenario for many leadership teams. It is no surprise that one of the challenges practice owners and managers face is keeping their finger on the pulse of the practice. According to Traction: Get A Grip On Your Business (Wickman, 2014)1 the five most common frustrations of running a business are a sense of lack of control, managing people, low profit, little to no growth, and the “nothing is working” feeling. Often, it can feel like it is impossible to know how your practice is doing due to the complexity and dynamics of running day-to-day operations.

Your practice is very much an entity that requires attention, care, and resources to support its sustainability and propel growth. Additionally, you must ensure your practice is readily able to adapt to changing times. You must have business skills and processes in place. The question is, how you can do this in a realistic way that will help your practice reach the next level and sustain continuous success? How can you manage your time? How can you hold your team accountable for achieving practice goals? Where do you even begin? Before answering these questions, you must start by understanding the basic components of your practice.

Understanding the Basics

By: Rachel Teichberg, CVPM

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that communication is a fundamental skill for each role in the practice, allowing teams to operate cohesively and efficiently. Communication is also at the core of how we work with our clients, ideally creating an environment of trust and understanding. Working with hundreds of practices over the last four years has taught me that we don’t spend enough time focused on the communication training that creates that desired trust and understanding from our clients. I get it. We’re always short on time and people, and sometimes it’s a miracle we make it through the day. This, however, is mission critical. If your goal is to provide excellent patient care, we have to start with communication.

Clients come to our practices because we’re the experts. Unfortunately, with that comes a curse of knowledge on our part. We often take for granted all the information we know, which can create a barrier when we try to communicate value of care. We simply forget how much of the things we need to communicate are not common knowledge. When we improperly explain our services or products, clients struggle to see the benefit it would provide their pet (aka it’s value).

Navigating the Difficult Conversation Trifecta
By: Rachel Teichberg, CVPM

I’ve watched this scene a thousand times… Dorothy and the gang anxiously making their way through the forest chanting “lions, and tigers and bears, oh my!” As they quickly skip their way along the yellow brick road, they eventually meet their lion. In practice, you come face to face with a lion daily, except yours is in the shape of difficult conversations.

All day long you have conversations with your coworkers. You chit-chat about the weekend, discuss plans for the day, ask for help with lab work, direct someone to pick up line three, follow up on those retirement party plans, and debrief about cases. All of this conversation flows seamlessly until you have a critique, a suggestion, or a problem. Just like that, communication comes to a grinding halt as you try to avoid having what you believe will be an awkward or emotional conversation.

Each time you avoid feedback, coaching, and conflict conversations you may feel like you’ve gained something in the short-term by saving yourself from feeling uncomfortable (as many people jump through incredible hoops to avoid). In the long-term, the effects of avoidance will present as low morale, low performance, low efficiency, and high turnover. All of those factors will directly affect your bottom line.

Feedback, coaching, and conflict are, in fact, three separate types of conversations and tools which can be approached in different ways to improve performance in your practice. Feedback conversations should occur between all team members, regardless of their place on the organizational chart, and are focused only on things that were witnessed by the person giving the feedback. That’s right, no triangulated communication, no gossiping, no running to the manager.

Written By: Julia Marlin, CVPM Director of Coaching Operations with Veterinary Growth Partners

The definition of employee engagement is the emotional commitment an employee has to the organization and its goals. It helps leaders focus on the actions that matter most to their team members. Achieving high employee engagement is an important method for driving a high-performing culture and accomplishing the goals of your hospital.

Employee engagement involves the basic psychological needs that must be met for employees to perform their specific roles well. An engaged employee “shows up,” physically, emotionally and cognitively. They are enthusiastic about what they have to do, and they naturally find ways to improve and excel. In short, engaged employees generate most of the creativity, innovation and excellence in your practice. Your employees are your greatest asset and what truly sets you apart from your competition.

How do we determine what an engaged employee is?

Gallup defines three types of employees: Engaged, Not Engaged, and Actively Disengaged employees.

Engaged Employees

• Highly involved in and enthusiastic about their work and workplace
• Psychological “owners”
• Drive performance and innovation
• Move the organization forward

Not Engaged Employees

• Essentially checked out and psychologically unattached to their work and company
• They put in time — but not energy or passion — into their work

Actively Disengaged Employees