When your optometric practice is ready to make a change, you may be met with some resistance. In some cases, the change may create uncertainty in your optometric staff and may even lead to employee turnover. The threat of losing staff members often keeps optometric practices from making the changes that they need to in order to keep up with the eyecare industry and patient needs.
In this post, we reveal a few tips to reduce the tension and uncertainty that could lead to employee turnover.
4 Ways to Reduce Employee Resistance to Optometric Practice Change
Solicit Buy-in
When you’re gearing up for a change in your practice, you should get your staff members involved as early as possible to reduce the fear of a change. By asking for feedback early, you can get a better sense of what your practice needs and how the change will affect your employee’s role.
To help get employee buy-in, invite the team to product demos and empower them to ask questions and contribute to the decisions being made.
Motivate
Along with asking for staff buy-in, you want to motivate your team about the change to get them excited about the big picture. To do this, emphasize the benefits the change will have on your practice and celebrate the success of your staff members as they complete training or a task related to the transition.
Additionally, assign a change champion on the staff-level to motivate the team and collect information about concerns.
Meet Regularly
Holding weekly meetings with your staff to go over the change progress can give you insight into how your staff is feeling about the change and if there are any problems that you need to direct your focus on.
While your staff members may not initially come out and disclose their concerns, it’s important to actively listen to them and address their problems early with honest responses.
Provide Resources
One way to get your optometric practice on board and comfortable with the change is to provide them with enough resources for them to make their own decisions about it. For example, if you’re changing your practice management and EHR software, you could work with the vendor to create a training program to help your practice prepare in advance and gain confidence about the transition.
Switching your practice management and EHR software? Prepare your practice for the optometry software change by reading, The Optometry Software Implementation Mini Guide.
