Communication strengths and weaknesses have a significant impact on your practice.

Every individual in your practice has their own unique way of communicating. Communication skills are developed and honed over a lifetime, patterned after our parents, teachers, bosses and workplace peers. One central challenge for practice leaders is to harness these unique communication styles and improve their collective strength in a way that supports the practice.

A deficit we are seeing significantly more of at this nearly post-pandemic moment is a gap in communication within practices. One example is practice meetings. Many practices have fallen out of the habit of holding regular meetings. The strains of staffing shortages are edging out meeting attendance. And, in some cases, video conferencing has continued to replace in-person meetings, which is better than nothing but far from ideal.

Gaps in communication create serious problems. Practice owners and administrators can become misaligned in goal setting and prioritizing resources. Management teams can lose focus, support each other less and accomplish less. Rather than working in sync to provide the best patient care, managers and their departments can become competitive and upset with each other. Each of these gaps reinforce the others and lead to frustration, low morale and owner frustration.

In addition to contributing to a more difficult and less pleasant work environment, poor communication impacts the practice financially. Efficiency declines, staff retention plummets, and it becomes harder to restore pre-pandemic levels of customer service.

Here are seven ways to overcome barriers to poor communication and help your team be better aligned and motivated.

1 SCHEDULE MEETINGS REGULARLY

It is false economy to believe that there is no time for meetings. Without meetings that identify and solve problems or improve processes, managers and staff waste way more time addressing the same problems repeatedly, and patient satisfaction suffers. (See “Suggested scheduled meetings,” below.)

2 RUN AN EFFECTIVE MEETING

A key skill of practice leadership is to be able to run a great meeting. The number, frequency and duration of meetings grows logarithmically with practice size. A practice with 30 people needs four times as much meeting time as a 15-worker practice.

Effective meetings generally include a written agenda to signal purpose and drive efficiency. Helping others prepare for an upcoming business meeting organizes the group and enhances outcomes. Great meeting leadership includes sending out a written agenda to all attendees prior to the meeting, sticking to the agenda and sending out clear post-meeting recap notes.

3 AVOID INEFFECTIVE DISCUSSIONS

Knowing the desired outcome when a conversation is launched (eg, just passing along information vs making a decision) helps you stay on task and drives the results towards a specific goal. When conversations lack focus and goals, the results fall short.

Before every important conversation, write out the talking points. For example, if you want to provide positive feedback to an employee, be sure you can specifically delineate the details that you think led them to success. This increases the odds that the desired behaviors will continue.

4 FOLLOW UP CONVERSATIONS AND MEETINGS

Even the best communication falls short without follow-up. One of the most common staff complaints we hear is, “We’ve told our administrator (or department manager) about this problem but have never heard back.” In both large and small practices, it’s a good habit to log all meaningful suggestions and questions and check them off as they are subsequently addressed.

Less experienced communicators often avoid giving out bad news about the disposition of staff or provider suggestions, thinking staff will be unhappy to hear that a suggestion has been declined. The opposite is true. Staff are more satisfied knowing that their ideas or concerns have been addressed, even if they won’t be implemented. If you have staff that were once motivated to make practice improvement suggestions and have stopped, that may be a sign that they need more feedback.

5 BE AN EXCELLENT LISTENER

Most of us start out as innately poor listeners — until we get feedback from others as we grow up. Many of us are defensive when we hear something about ourselves we don’t like. Being open to suggestion and responding with, “You may be right, tell me more,” encourages the disclosure of information you need to make improvements in the practice. If most staff feel they can broach any subject, even difficult ones, with practice leadership, communication in your practice is working well.

6 BE PREPARED FOR INFORMAL AND UNSCHEDULED MEETINGS

Some meetings happen spontaneously, and that’s just fine. Be prepared to use the time wisely and keep a running list of topics to be discussed in a file folder or e-file. Each time a topic or idea arises that can wait for a future meeting, add it to the “be-ready-to-discuss file” so it doesn’t fall through the cracks of busy days.

7 ASK FOR FEEDBACK

Would you like to be a better communicator? Ask someone you trust for feedback. “How would you score my communication skills on a 1–10 scale? What could I do more, less, differently to communicate more effectively?” It may feel uncomfortable to ask this, but the tips you get could improve your leadership skills for life. OM

Corinne Z. Wohl, MHSA, COE, is president of C. Wohl & Associates, Inc., a practice management consulting firm. Corinne earned her Masters of Health Services Administration degree at The George Washington University and has over 30 years of hospital, physician practice management and management consulting experience. Her latest book, co-authored with John Pinto, is “UP: Taking Ophthalmic Administrators and Their Management Teams to the Next Level of Skill, Performance and Career Satisfaction.” For information on how to purchase this book or other inquiries, she can be reached at czwohl@gmail.com or 609-410-2932.

John B. Pinto is the founder of J. Pinto & Associates, Inc., an ophthalmic practice consulting firm established in 1979. He is the most published author in the world on the subject of ophthalmic management and economics. The firm serves organizations worldwide, ranging from solo practices to high-volume market leaders, teaching centers and medical product companies, providing strategic planning, financial benchmarking and analysis, operations enhancement and marketing counsel. He can be reached at pintoinc@aol.com or 619-223-2233.