A critical component of an efficient work environment that sometimes goes overlooked is the staffing mix. In essence, are you optimizing each employee’s responsibilities and their ability to work together to provide the best care for children? Sometimes, practices have very efficient workflows in place, but because an individual in a critical step of the process is not the right fit, the outcomes are not as impressive as expected.
For pediatric practices, payroll and vaccines are the two biggest expenses. This means every practice needs to focus on investing wisely when it comes to staffing. If there is an issue within the day-to-day activities of your practice, one should not assume that they need to replace any particular employee. A better option to consider is moving the pieces of the puzzle around to see if a different configuration provides an improved result. The ability to move employees around is predicated on having the right people on your team. Having difficulty identifying the right talent to help your practice? Consider the resources offered by PMI to help with the interviewing process.
Evaluating your staffing mix can also be useful when an employee leaves the practice. Before deciding to hire a replacement, one should carefully evaluate if there is a way to shift the remaining staff around to cover the responsibilities of the departing employee without being overly burdensome on the remaining members of the team. When looking at this situation, a helpful tool is the “Responsibility Matrix”, which we have discussed here. This tool can help you track the responsibilities of each employee and therefore help drive the conversation surrounding whether employees can take on more duties while ensuring everything needed to run the practice is being tended to.
Both the staffing mix and process efficiency are major contributors to ensuring the practice is operating smoothly. If one of them is off, it will be hard to keep your team focused on providing the best medical home for children. In our experience, a review of your staffing mix provides an excellent opportunity for the practice to identify areas of improvement.
