If you’re in business for yourself as a dentist or physician in private practice, sooner or later you will be faced with the decision to make a new hire. But before you start writing the placement ad for your new hire, it’s important that you clearly define whether or not hiring is actually the right choice.
Many doctors love the idea of hiring to reduce their workload and relieve their stress. However, if you don’t actually need the help, bringing on someone else on will actually do more harm than good.
Before you commit to the hiring pipeline, assess team responsibilities, work to eliminate process bottlenecks, and identify discernible business trends that support your decision.
The time and effort you spend up front in determining your real staffing needs will be well worth avoiding the potentially costly burden of an unnecessary hire.
1. Assess Team Responsibilities
Sometimes we may feel overwhelmed and think we need to hire when there’s actually huge opportunity to leverage our existing staff more effectively.
When we have clear picture of who does what, a few hiring alternatives may begin to surface.
Rebalance the workload
Chances are good that not everybody on your team is pulling the same weight. When you assess team responsibilities, you may find opportunities to redistribute the workload.
As the doctor, don’t forget to include yourself in this exercise! Be honest when assessing how you spend your time. Is a growing percentage spent on non-value-add administrative tasks that could be done by someone else?
Ideally, each person on your team is doing the highest value work that they are equipped to do. Everything else should be delegated.
Eliminate redundancies
There may be operational efficiencies to be gained by eliminating redundant work between team members.
It’s natural for employees to take on additional responsibilities over time. But often this leads to some team members performing duties that are outside of their wheelhouse.
If two people are doing the same thing, it might make sense to figure out who does it best and make it their sole responsibility to get it done. This could free up the other person to take on additional work that they know how to do best.
Bottom Line:
Before you take steps to increase the size of your team, you should be very clear on the current roles and responsibilities of your team. It’s very likely that your team has a greater capacity than you think.
2. Improve Bottleneck Processes
Sometimes a single process can be the bottleneck that inhibits growth. When this is the case, throwing labor at the problem is one of the worst decisions we can make. The extra help will either hide the problem temporarily, or it may make it even worse.
One approach you can use to help improve your processes is value stream mapping. Value stream mapping is a lean management tool that helps you visualize the steps taken to complete a process. It can help you understand your business better and identify areas for improvement.
As a general overview, value stream mapping consists of mapping the current state, imagining the ideal state, and then comparing the two to identify ways to improve.
Map the Current State
Work with the team members involved in the process to map out each step. What are the exact sequence of events? How is information communicated from one step to the next?
Use sticky notes and a whiteboard. Don’t be afraid to get into the details, but also don’t get bogged down by them. If a process has many different variations, step back and map the general process for the majority of cases.
Having a clear baseline understanding of how the process works today is critical to identifying the root cause of the problem.
Map the Ideal State
After you agree on how the process works today, your team should outline what the ideal process would look like.
From personal experience doing this exercise in the past, you should expect ~30-50% fewer process steps in the ideal state.
When you map the current state, you often find duplicated and excessive steps. The ideal process map will give you direction – like a north star – for where you want to go.
Commit to Incremental Improvements
It would be impossible to immediately go from current state to your ideal state. But it is possible to make incremental progress.
Assign one team member to lead the implementation of one step that would get you closer to your ideal state. Tie the improvement project to a metric, if possible, so you can objectively track whether or not you’re making progress.
Bottom Line:
If broken processes are holding you back from growth, hiring another person is a very expensive fix. Do your best to improve the bottleneck processes before you commit to more staff.
3. Identify Long Term Trends
After
The last thing to consider is whether or not the need for additional staff is a temporary burden or a long term growth trend.
How to Measure Growth
There are many different ways to measure the growth of your business. The important thing is that you use some quantifiable objective metric to help justify your decision to hire.
Some metrics you might consider include:
Number of new patients: Are you seeing an upward trend month over month?- Staff overtime: Does staff overtime follow seasonal trends? Or has it become an operating norm?
- Patient wait time: Is the time that a patient has to wait to get a specific appointment longer than reasonable?
Claims unbilled: Is the billing department behind in getting insurance claims timely processed?
Bottom Line:
Don’t move forward with the hiring process until you have evidence to support long term growth. It may still be best to resist the urge to hire until you see how the numbers align with your long term business goals.
Post Summary
- Hiring is a critical (and potentially costly) business decision. It’s important that you do your due diligence before you proceed.
- Assess your current team’s responsibilities. Identify any opportunity to rebalance or redistribute workloads.
- Improve bottleneck processes. Hiring is a poor solution to a process problem. Try making incremental improvements before you add people to the problem.
- Identify business trends to support your decision. Don’t hire full time for a temporary need. Look to objective metrics that support a long term hire.
Tyler DeVries
Business Systems Engineer
Tyler is passionate about helping small business owners lead and manage effective teams. His work is focused on developing digital practice management resources for independent healthcare providers.
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