You may have heard about the many P’s in business! From product, promotion, price, placement, productivity (trust me, this may take a while…) but the 3 P’s that you need in your practice include People, Processes and Profits. Your practice will not be successful unless your clients feel that they can connect and build a relationship with the people who work at your practice. From receptionists to nurses to vets to assistants – it truly takes a team to make your practice function optimally. Additionally, your employees may become frustrated if the processes prevent them from practicing veterinary medicine at the level at which they want and even contribute to inefficiencies. Lastly, the often-forgotten P is profit – if your business does not have profitably, there is no reason to be in business. So how can you make enough profit to sustain the business?
People
Your team – what do you want them to achieve? Feel fulfilled? To have positive working relationships? Do you value the happiness of your employees? Do you think happiness is the responsibility of employees themselves or their employers? How do you ensure that your vets are happy and why is it so important to have happy veterinarians working at your practice?
Happiness in the workplace is vital as happy employees are more productive, engaged, motivated, fit more effectively into high-performance teams, better leaders, and have higher job performance. They are six times more energised than unhappy employees, are more likely to build up personal resources to help them perform better at work and invest themselves in their work. Happiness and health showed a direct link and happy employees were far less likely to fall ill and when they do, their recovery times were a lot faster. Happy employees took a tenth of the sick leave when compared to unhappy employees.
Recent research has demonstrated that happy employees were far more loyal and showed a lower probability of leaving the organization; thereby decreasing recruitment costs and raising retention statistics. Happy employees intended to stay double the amount of time of unhappy employees. They were more successful innovators, showed greater creativity in conceptualisation and embraced change much better than unhappy employees. They were more adaptable, valued teamwork and were viewed as far more altruistic and generous.
When veterinary professionals are unhappy, the consequences tend to include increased stress, burnout and moral stress, which lead to them having feelings of helplessness, hopelessness and incompetence. This can severely affect their problem-solving ability and lead to poor quality decision making. Although these are concerning – the impact of unhappy employees’ extent far beyond the human element and can impact practices socially and financially. It was found that unhappy employees spend only 40% of their time on work - meaning 3 days are spent unproductively and can lead to severe monetary losses in your practice. Additionally, unhappy employees create instability and risk and can even harm the projects that they are involved in by causing conflict between co-workers and breeding negativity.
Processes
Processes are defined as a series of actions taken to achieve a concrete goal, (Oxford Dictionary). So, without knowing what you want to achieve, how can you implement processes to drive your practice forward?
Processes can include nurses’ rounds, scheduling of work so that your vets rotate obligations that may impact on their well-being (such as alternating euthanasia’s, managerial work that may not be a strength of certain team members and positively impacting individuals such as giving vets opportunities to enhance their skills, going on CPD courses and taking responsibility for a program at the practice that they care about). The increased responsibility of such a program can give a vet the opportunity to manage it from conceptualization to completion and will assist with buy-in from fellow staff members as the new program is the initiative of one of the peers and not forced onto them by managers who are not involved in day-to-day operations of the practice.
Can you implement software that assist you with offering automated “personal” care to clients? What processes can you easily implement to reduce stress in your waiting room? How often do you review the processes you have in place?
Profit
At the end of the day, the veterinary practice is a business with an aim of making a healthy profit. All processes in the practice need to support the chosen business strategy and all of the people working there need to buy into the practice programs in order to make it successful.
Just remember: Profits vs profitability – yes, there is a difference! Profits = income minus expenses but profitability measures whether there is enough profit to sustain the business. Often people associate turnover with success, however, turnover does not measure profitability – what expenses do you have in order to generate that income? It is good to review all your sources of revenue and expenses and see where you can save and what you can do to increase profitability.
Generating profit is important – but having the right people and implementing the best processes to help your practice function optimally can be your formula to success.
What are your thoughts? Do you have any tips you would like to share about how you make these Ps work in your practice?
