In an optometric practice, your staff interacts with dozens of people daily, either face to face or over the phone. Under pressure to create positive interactions with every person your staff comes in contact with, it’s important that you create a culture where your staff is excited to come to work. Boost positive vibes to increase productivity and a shared success throughout your optometric practice.

In this post, we’ll share a few tips on how you can build a positive culture to motivate your staff and increase productivity throughout your optometric practice.

How to Create a Productive Culture in Your Optometric Practice

Make Breaks Mandatory

Taking real breaks throughout the day reduces stress, improves productivity, and increases effectiveness. By encouraging your staff to take breaks and regroup you can help prevent employee burnout and reduce employee turnover rates.

If you see that staff members are working through their breaks, check with them and see if there’s too much on their plate.

Socialize Off-site

Often, building collaborative relationships in the workplace starts outside of work. Especially if your practice has an optimized office workflow that promotes efficiently moving patients through your practice, then your staff may not have time in the office to build relationships with each other. By hosting off-site events, you can get the staff members to connect to build trust and foster collaboration.

Some ways you can create socializing events are though:

• Volunteer events
• Monthly happy hours
• Birthday lunches for the whole office

Document Your Culture

Your practice may have an employee handbook that describes how you want your staff to dress and behave. But is there anything about the culture you want to create in your practice? It doesn’t have to be anything too extensive, but by simply documenting your culture code, you can set standards from the very beginning of an employee’s time at your practice.

Everyone Contributes

If a key component of your culture is transparency, then you need to be open and honest with your staff members. The moment your staff thinks that you’ve deviated from your culture code, then you have failed, and the standards you attempted to create are invalid. When it comes to culture, everyone contributes.

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Editor's Note: Originally published in May 2017. Updated in June 2022.