How Do We Fix Poor Clinic Culture

How do you get more new patients or hire more clinicians at your clinic and yet still remain profitable? This is the question, and I'm on a journey to get you the answer. I'm going to interview the best marketers and clinic owners across the world to give you access to their winning strategies from recruitment, marketing, operations, finance, and more. So you can easily take action on the secrets to grow your clinic. I'm Rick Lau. Welcome to Clinic Boss Secrets. Hey, everybody, Rick Lau here. When you have a clinic that has a bad work culture, it could totally affect the patient experience and cause patients to flee. Check out this episode where I interview Paul and we talk about how do we fix poor clinic culture. Check it out.

All right, so these are four ways to fix poor culture. And again, this is more philosophical. So, you know, I'm going to just kind of run through these things, but again, I think through examples like, you know, I want people to be vulnerable on this call. It's a safe environment. I want people to sort of, you know, tell us your ish, like your current scenario, and then we're going to try to work, work through that. Okay, so four ways. Actually, I have five here, so let me just change that. So five ways to fix poor culture. Okay. Number one, you want to accept responsibility as the leader. Okay? There's nothing worse than a leader who denies the fact that they had no part in it. And one of the things that I always do whenever a culture issue comes up is I recognize the fact that I didn't do enough to prevent this thing from happening, whatever this thing was. Okay? You also want to acknowledge the issues. Right? So I know for myself, I've had this habit of trying to push things under the rug, not clearly and bluntly addressing what the issue was, because I felt like, you know, if I did that, I would put, I would throw people under the bus or I would be viewed as blaming someone. Okay? But acknowledging issues is, is just as important as accepting responsibility. Because if you don't acknowledge the right issues, guess what? The perception that people have will be that you, you didn't deal with the current scenario fully. You just kind of, like, dealt with it in a very haphazard way or in a very rushed way. And you, you know, and they're going to, again, their perception of you as a leader is not going to be, you know, where you want it. It's not going to be, you know, you're going to lose a little credibility. Okay? And then the next thing is, once you accept responsibility, acknowledge issues, you also want to get feedback. Let's say you have a meeting about this specific issue. You want to get feedback on how you can improve the process, okay? Because that feedback, if you actually apply some of the feedback that you get, will win you some credibility points, okay? Now the second thing that you're going to do, so let's say you have a meeting with all the parties that are involved with this culture issue, right? Is you want to actually set the new ground rules, okay? So let's say, for example, people are gossiping and they're gossiping a very particular issue. And it's a, you know, Jim versus Sally type scenario. And you bring Jim and Sally into a meeting, you've acknowledged you've done all these things except responsibility, knowledge issue, get. And then obviously feedback will be after the meeting, but you still have to set what are the new ground rules, what are the new policies? Maybe it's a new policy or procedure, right? And then you have to stick to them, right? So maybe part of the process is, hey, listen, we are going to meet regularly for the next four weeks until this thing is resolved, whatever this thing is, right? Or maybe it's something that you deal with in your current meeting rhythms, right? Maybe part of the ground rules is that we're going to talk about what the conflict resolution methods are, okay? So one of the things that I hate is gossip in my clinic. So one of my conflict resolution methods is every time I hear about like someone gossiping in the clinic, whoever you're gossiping about, whoever the gosper is and whoever the gosper is talking about, we are actually going to bring you guys into a meeting. It's going to be a group meeting. And every single time we are going to work to resolve it, right? If they know that those are the ground rules and I actually follow through, it will get very awkward. And most people want to avoid conflict or they want to avoid awkwardness, right? So immediately, if they know those ground rules, they know they want to avoid those situations. It typically, at the very least, like, brings the intensity of the gossiping down quickly. Okay? One of the reasons why we might have culture issues is that I didn't explain to everybody the org structure, the rules and responsibilities, like who is responsible for what, right? And so communicating this to everyone is very, very key. One of the problems that I see all the time is that with org structure, we don't communicate the roles and responsibilities and who does what. And maybe we do within our leadership structure, but we don't even communicate it with to our ground level staff, right? And Maybe that's where all the politics and the bad culture is happening, right? So setting new ground rules, sticking to them. And really, you can see that communication is sort of sprinkled throughout all of these scenarios, right? That's. That's how we're gonna. We're gonna use these methods to make sure communication is at its highest level. Okay. The other thing that I do is these two kind of go together, and I kind of alluded to this, is I isolate the troublemakers and I embrace the awkwardness. Okay? A lot of people can't handle, like, they don't like the awkwardness. Not they can't handle it, but they don't like the awkwardness. Even the people who are mediating, Right? But to me, I view it as, hey, this is going to be fun. It's going to be fun to see the gossip or squirm when they're like, they have to explain themselves to the gossipy or the person that the person is gossiping about. And it's going to be fun to resolve this scenario. I look forward to these things because, you know, it's a different mindset. And usually if you have a positive mindset around it, you'll get positive results. Right? And the other, the final key thing that I'll say is, if you had a person smoking in your clinic, would you just walk by them and let them to continue smoking the clinic? Absolutely not. You would not. You would stop. You would say, put out that cigarette. You're never going to smoke in here again. Right. And the problem is, is that like, anytime an issue comes up and we witness it, we kind of try to avoid it and walk away and say, okay, maybe it just happens once and it won't happen again, or maybe this is a third time. But I gave him a more. Gave this person a warning last week. So I don't want to nag them. Right? No. Our job is to actually point out the issues, catch them when they happen, identify our lead. Like, make sure our leaders understand that they also have to not let people smoke in the clinic and they have to deal with it right away, especially if that person's their direct report. Okay? Does that make sense, guys?

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