Retention
Maintaining a strong team is key to your company’s success. Turnover can be costly to your practice and negatively impact the patient experience. For the employee, retention goes far beyond a good salary or an increase in pay. When employees feel supported and aligned with your company’s values, they’re more likely to thrive. A well-structured onboarding experience and a strong company culture are vital in helping new hires integrate smoothly and perform at their best. By focusing on these areas, you create an environment where employees are motivated to stay and grow with your team.
How Does Retention Impact A Practice?
When experienced employees leave, it can trigger a cascade effect—leading to knowledge gaps that reduce onboarding effectiveness. It can expose a culture that is unequipped to effectively support new employees, resulting in confusion and frustration for your existing and new team members.
The cascading effect of poor employee retention can hurt every corner of your business, but Fuel has the tools and training to help you get back on track.
How Do I Break The Cascade Effect?
Our human resources and professional development experts help you evaluate your company culture and integrate the missing elements that have a proven track record of improving employee engagement, satisfaction and, in turn, retention.
To get a good idea of your company culture, picture how your current staff would answer questions like these:
- Why would you recommend someone to work here?
- Why do you continue to work here?
- Do you feel supported by your team and manager?
- Do you feel like your skills are being used effectively?
Asking these questions puts you in a position of vulnerability, but they will give you key insights into your employees’ frame of mind about their jobs—and help shed light on your turnover rates. Once we know the missing links, we can help you build your company culture into a thriving and attractive employee experience.
What are the Elements of a Thriving Workplace Culture?
Our talented human resources and professional development teams have worked together to identify the five key elements contributing to workplace culture:
- Purpose: Connecting employees to your core values
- Opportunity: Providing growth opportunities at every level
- Success: Celebration of individual and group accomplishment
- Appreciation: Showing contributions are valued and meaningful
- Leadership: Encouraging success and self-empowerment to perform
How Fuel Helps: A thriving and supportive workplace doesn’t happen by accident. It takes intentional choices. Fuel’s professional development team can help you examine your practice and take proactive steps to craft an ideal workplace culture that promotes employee engagement and maximizes retention.
Employee Satisfaction
Employee satisfaction starts on the first day. With employees changing jobs more frequently, finding ways to engage and retain your new hires can be challenging—but you’re up to it. With Fuel Medical’s proven onboarding program including assets, walkthroughs and integrative training, you can set your employees up for success.
Onboarding that Connects
Static onboarding practices leave employees feeling confused, alone and disengaged. With Fuel’s system, you can integrate by degrees that build on one another, mitigating common issues that can occur weeks after hiring if an intentional support system isn’t in place. A few ways we help encourage whole-company integration include:
- Set up inter-departmental meetings: Initial welcome meetings or lunches with one or more members of different departments will help your employees feel connected to the practice as a whole, rather than just their immediate team.
- Goal-focused learning: Start by explaining the why of each task before telling your new employee how to perform it. Knowing not just how to do something but why you’re doing it helps connect your job to the larger goals of the practice.
- Give them purpose: Share your organization’s values or mission with your new hire. Give them tasks to complete that involve looking at your website and patient reviews to help them learn about your practice and patient base. By demonstrating how your practice operates and helps its patients, you’re helping your new employees gain a better sense of purpose in their role.
Set Them Up For Success
Our Buddy Program is designed to connect a new hire with a buddy from a different department to work with for a limited period. Having a buddy outside of a manager’s direct feedback loop gives a new employee someone to ask questions of, vent to about small things and open up about worries or stumbles.
It reveals a different side of the company, expands relationships beyond the initial team and gives other employees an opportunity to teach and grow. Try introducing the Buddy Program to your next new employee!
How Fuel Helps: Our customizable onboarding program includes assets and walkthroughs. With the help and expertise of our professional development team, we can collaborate to create a unique program that capitalizes on your practice’s strengths while providing new employees with a concrete foundation for success.
Patient Experience
The patient journey isn’t just about the patient, it’s about where the patient is in relation to their healthcare provider. Understanding the patient journey is the best way to understand the patient experience. Making that experience positive at every step is how you build the kind of relationship a patient just has to share.
You Have To Engage To Affect the Patient Journey
What’s the key to altering a patient’s entire journey? It’s engagement. How you engage, when you engage and why you engage. We help practices implement purposeful patient engagement strategies that match the touchpoints on their map.
We approach engagement changes with training exercises that follow best practices for every interaction and stage in the patient journey. Our method isn’t concerned with where your team began, but where they can go.
Engage patients early in the health care journey to identify values and recognize that patient engagement does not begin and end with a single encounter.
Jim Fedio, Director of Professional Development
How Fuel Helps: Every practice has its own variation of the patient journey, and we want to understand yours. The most effective way is to visit your locations, meet your staff, and diagram your individual patient flow and practice process.
Fuel Medical Group can help you achieve the best outcome for your practice, no matter where your patient’s journey leads them—learn more about our professional development team to learn more.
Reviews/Goal Setting
Many practices don’t have the space to promote employees, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room to grow. Employee performance reviews and goal setting meetings offer the perfect opportunity to provide clear expectations, establish open communication and craft a positive workplace culture.
Fuel can help you find the right questions to promote positive goal creation. A few questions you might consider include:
- What skills would you like to grow in your job?
- How can we support you in your career?
- What achievements have you been most proud of since your last review?
- Are there any improvements you suggest for our processes or culture?
How Fuel Helps: By asking the right questions during employee reviews and goal-setting meetings, you can identify opportunities to improve your overall practice beyond focusing on individual roles. We can help you align employee goals with practice goals, creating further cohesion between the two to help individual employees champion opportunities that align with your greater vision for your practice.
Social Presence
LinkedIn is an excellent way to showcase your practice’s news, skills, employees, events and more. Our social media experts at Fuel can make tailored recommendations for the right content and connect your LinkedIn page to our social platform to upload posts automatically.
Brand/Culture Workshop
Finding What’s Important to You
The first part of establishing a thriving workplace culture is identifying what’s important to you and your employees. For example, some practices are driven by growth and success, while others are motivated by fun and innovation.
Fuel guides you through the process of finding and demonstrating your values to build a thriving culture. To do this, we usually ask questions like:
- Why do you think teamwork is one of our values?
- What about collaboration is important to you?
- What does integrity look like in your role?
- How have you seen compassion demonstrated?
Our expert professional development team provides an award-winning array of custom insights, tools and actionable solutions to improve practice performance, patient outcomes and workplace culture.
I had Jim [Fedio] come in, and we did a whole training with my front office staff on the idea of “That’s not my job.” He got everybody on the same page of: “We’re all one team, and it doesn’t matter what department you’re in; we’re going to help each other.”
And it started a little snowball effect because we sat down and created what we thought our company’s culture was. Then he met with the MAs, and they did the same thing, and he met with billing and did the same thing. And then all [of] the management team got together, and we pulled those words together to create our motto.
Then we had a whole companywide meeting, and it was so cool for everybody to see what their parts were in creating [the motto] and that it wasn’t just us saying, “This is what we believe in,” and “This is why.” It was them. They created that. And when we started this whole “What is our culture [training],” you literally see the change in people because of what you’re doing. I just want to shout this from the rooftops because it literally changes people. It changes everyone, and patients can feel it when they come in the door. It truly is amazing. And I’m not just saying that; I mean it.
Lori Larsen, Marketing Manager at South Valley Ear, Nose & Throat
Why Does This Process Matter?
Identifying and demonstrating your values gives your employees a shared cause to rally behind. This helps them reengage with their jobs, see the value of their work and be less likely to feel burned out. Not only will a thriving workplace culture help you retain experienced employees, but your patients will notice and benefit from the improvements.
How Fuel Helps: Remember, creating a better patient experience starts with workplace culture. If your workplace isn’t operating at peak performance, our professional development experts can help you analyze and integrate your culture with your employee hiring and operations processes to maximize engagement and retention.
