The Official VisionWeb Blog

There might be a time in your eyecare practice when you fall in love with a job candidate that seems to have all the things that you're looking for, except experience working in an eyecare office or maybe even in a healthcare practice at all.

While this could give you some pause as to whether or not you want to move forward with this candidate, we want to offer up some training ideas that will help you effectively train someone who doesn't have the experience, but has a strong willingness to learn. 

Office meetings provide a way for you and your team to maintain focus on your team goals and help identify problems that threaten your optometric practice’s ability to meet those objectives.

Also, weekly meetings are a great way to strengthen a team's bond. Meetings may seem like they are going strong in the beginning, over time you will find that participation is starting to wane. When your staff members stop engaging in your team meetings, it could snowball into to other problems like missed goals, staff turnover, and errors due to decreased communication.

To help revive the energy in your optometric practice team meetings, we’ve provided a few tips below.

You might have heard the term upcycling in terms of clothing or home goods, but we can apply this to making your eyecare practice more eco-friendly. Upcycling is when you take an item that can no longer be used as intended, put some work into it, and either restore it or use it for something else. It's different from recycling because you aren't crushing it into its organic parts, simply changing its use.

This concept can very much be applied to items in your practice. Especially for things you were already going to throw out, upcycling can save you money and be a collaborative project for your team. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Disagreements in the workplace can slow down your office workflow and add stress to your entire optometric practice. Although your staff may get along 95% of the time, there will always be times where conflicts arise. When your staff has disagreements, you have to resolve them quickly before they impact your entire team, your workflow, and your profits.

Below are conflict resolution tips to keep the peace in your optometric practice.

This article from the AOA discusses the benefits staff certification can have for your patients and your practice. If you have a team of staff that is 100% paraoptometric certified, it lets your community and patients know that your practice is committed to providing the highest level of patient care.

After seeing the AOA's great post, we wanted to revisit an article we wrote a while back, Why Paraoptometric Certification is a Worthy Investment.