Your employees wear many different hats to ensure that your practice runs smoothly and patients are getting the care they need. However, after the end-of-the-year rush to help your patients use their benefits before they expire, your staff may be feeling a bit burnt-out.
When your optometric practice staff experiences burn-out, it could result in a decrease in productivity, poor patient experiences, workplace tension, and high employee turnover. Below are six steps to prevent employee burn-out.
How to Prevent Employee Burn-out in Your Optometric Practice
Monitor Workload
A cause of employee burn-out can be due to a large amount of work or competing responsibilities. If you see a loss in productivity or suspect an employee, may be experiencing burn-out, look at their workload, and help them prioritize or delegate their tasks.
Provide Growth Opportunities
Providing career growth opportunities helps to motivate your staff and inspire them to think differently about their tasks. Mapping out a career path for your staff members can help your employees who may be experiencing burn-out to focus on something that they enjoy doing or is a change from their day-to-day role.
Reinforce Purpose
Sometimes, your staff forgets why they do what they do and how enhancing the patient care is important to your practice and your community. Remind your employees of the bigger picture and the impact of their work. To do this, regularly tell success stories and praise your team when you receive good feedback from a patient or witness a staff member going beyond to help a patient.
Boost Morale
Whether you’re aware of it or not, your management style may be sabotaging your optical practice culture. Developing an office environment by feeding into negative actions will cause your team to burn-out quickly. By paying attention to your practice culture, you can decrease the possibility of office burn-out and increase the quality of work for your patients.
Establish Set Hours
Forming set work hours and requiring that staffers shouldn’t work past those hours protects your practice, establishes a work-life balance for your staff, and lessens the possibility of work fatigue. When you create standard business hours for your staff members to work, it creates a routine and eliminates the element of surprise.
Seek Help
If you’re still finding that your team members are overworked and are succumbing to work-related stress, it may be time to allocate resources and hire additional team members, outsource some of the less critical tasks, or onboard software that will help your staff members do their job more efficiently and with less stress.
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