Employee engagement is a priority for all types of businesses, as engaged workers are more likely to strive to excel in their roles. However, the healthcare industry faces greater engagement challenges than most others, as evidenced by these statistics:
- A 2024 study found that 75 percent of healthcare employees and 63 percent of managers report feeling burned out or ambivalent in their current positions.
- Another study found that 45 percent of registered nurses reported experiencing feelings of burnout at least a few times a week.
- Healthcare employee engagement scores declined in 2024 across nearly all roles.
When your team is disengaged or overwhelmed, errors increase, patient satisfaction scores drop, and your practice’s financial health suffers. That’s why it’s worthwhile (and even necessary) to incorporate strategies that boost employee engagement at your medical practice. In this article, we’ll outline five strategies that will help you do just that.
1. Optimize Operational Workflows
Although a single inefficient process might not seem detrimental, it can quickly snowball into a frustrating experience for staff members. Friction in daily tasks leads to burnout, which in turn results in poor employee engagement, regardless of the benefits or perks your medical practice offers.
To avoid creating an environment that encourages employee disengagement, focus on optimizing your operational workflows. Here are a few ways you can get started:
- Standardize processes: Different approaches to billing or record-keeping across staff members create unnecessary stress as employees struggle to understand what others have done. Establish standard operating procedures for routine tasks like patient check-in, insurance validation, and denial management. This gives staff members a clear roadmap for their next actions, reducing decision fatigue and friction.
- Clarify employee roles: Ensure job descriptions align with employees’ daily workloads. Throwing new hires into the deep end with tasks outside of their job descriptions may cause them to quickly disengage or, worse yet, leave your practice altogether. Additionally, preventing “scope creep” helps employees feel successful, empowered, and focused in their specific roles.
- Refine intake: Identify bottlenecks in the patient intake process, such as communication issues between front-desk staff and physicians or an inefficient insurance validation process. Smoothing out the physical and digital handoffs here reduces lobby congestion, a major stressor for front-desk staff.
In certain cases, outsourcing work can keep your operations running smoothly. For instance, if you don’t have any experienced billers on your team, you might look into revenue cycle management (RCM) billing services to get experienced professionals to handle these types of tasks for you.
2. Leverage the Right Medical Technology
When talented staff members spend hours on repetitive or tedious tasks, their job satisfaction plummets, leaving them disengaged. Modern practice management software can easily address these issues by automating routine tasks and streamlining mundane processes.
According to PracticeSuite, these tools often include features such as:
- Patient portal
- Appointment scheduling
- Telehealth
- Electronic health records (EHR)
- Billing and claims management
- Inventory management
- Reporting and analytics
With these features, you can easily streamline workflows for scheduling, billing, and communications. For example, without a practice management system, you may have to call patients to schedule and confirm appointments. With a robust platform, you can enable patients to schedule appointments themselves through the patient portal. Then, they’ll receive automated emails and texts that confirm and remind them of their appointment time.
If you’re already using medical technology, look for a practice management solution that integrates with your existing tools. That way, all of your data will work together seamlessly and can be combined into a data warehouse for a complete picture of your practice’s success.
3. Invest in Specialized Training and Development
Healthcare regulations, best care practices, and payer rules change almost daily. This can quickly make employees feel that they are unprepared or even “behind,” which can lead to anxiety, stress, and eventually less engagement. Offering specialized training and development empowers your employees by helping them acquire the skills they need to continue to succeed in the healthcare industry.
Start by offering to subsidize certification courses for medical billers and coders. You can even take it a step further by exploring virtual healthcare education programs and creating a list that your employees can easily refer to. You can also enable cross-training, such as by allowing front-desk staff to shadow clinical coordinators or billing managers. This helps them learn more about the other essential tasks your practice manages and helps them diversify their skills.
When employees see that your practice is investing in their professional future, they’ll be more engaged with their work and more likely to put their best foot forward.
4. Empower Staff with Autonomy
Although rules and regulations requiring strict oversight govern the medical industry, you don’t have to micro-manage your employees. Instead of leading to better clinical outcomes and operational efficiencies, micro-management can actually have the reverse effect, especially in smaller practices where agility is key.
Your office manager, billing lead, and reception staff likely know the bottlenecks in your operations better than anyone else. Instead of micro-managing these individuals, give them the autonomy to solve problems.
For example, if your billing team suggests a change to the intake form to reduce claim rejections, pilot their idea. If reception suggests a new check-in flow to reduce lobby congestion, let them lead the implementation. When employees feel their input directly shapes their work environment, they feel empowered to collaborate and contribute to your practice’s success.
5. Create a Culture of Recognition
Working with patients can be draining. These individuals are often stressed and anxious about their own health, which can spill over into their interactions with your staff. As a result, your employees might not have as many positive interactions as they would hope for.
To improve engagement, positively reinforce great employee performance by incorporating recognition into your workplace. Here are a few examples to get started:
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- Peer-to-peer shoutouts: Create a physical board or a digital channel where staff can publicly thank colleagues for help during a busy shift.
- “Save of the week”: Highlight a team member who caught a billing error, diffused a difficult patient encountered, or otherwise helped with a difficult situation.
- Handwritten notes from leadership: A handwritten note from a leadership member thanking an employee for a specific action is powerful and highly memorable.
Recognition validates the hard work that often goes unnoticed in busy medical practices. You can even follow Double the Donation’s recommendation and invest in a specific employee engagement tool. These platforms enable everything from peer-to-peer recognition to employee gifts to sending feedback—all you need to do is find the one that best fits your needs and the culture of your medical practice.
Improving employee engagement at your medical practice isn’t as simple as making a one-off change. It requires a commitment to providing a better working environment for your employees, one that empowers them to strive for excellence and help fulfill your practice’s goals. With these strategies, you can begin creating a workplace where staff members want to stay.
