Five Tips for APPs to Hang On to Their Team

In our last post, we asked how APPs can help keep their support staff:

–  What can we do as APPs to motivate our support team while staying within our boundaries as organizational employees?
–  How can we make things better for the teams we rely upon to care for our patients?
–  How can we boost morale without taking money out of our own pockets?

“5 Ways to Retain Good Staff” suggests that a critical factor for retaining good support staff revolves around the personal relationships clinicians develop with their team. After a physician-boss, Dr. Roger Shenkel, and office manager, Cathy Gardner, polled their employees at a family practice, the team reported the following office characteristics that kept them most satisfied with their jobs:

• Clinician interest and care regarding employees and their family
• Clinician expression of appreciation for a job well done
• Staff pride in the high level of care office clinicians provide to their patients and communities
• The staff knows they can grow their professional skills and responsibilities within the practice [1].

The authors provide five tips for retaining good office staff:

1. Talk to people: Clinicians and managerial staff should address all of the support staff by their names and try to say “hello” to everyone at some point during the day.
2. Acknowledge a job well done: When the day goes well, thank the people responsible for it (scheduling, your MAs, etc). Thank the staff member(s) face-to-face.
3. Foster personal relationships: Acknowledge and discuss individual events and issues with your staff, celebrate their birthdays, and recognize work anniversaries.
4. Encourage management to help staff succeed at work: The authors cite the importance of annual performance reviews and providing employee handbooks, and these things are typically out of an APP’s control. However, the suggestion to entrust employees with greater responsibilities and tasks as their skill set advances will help facilitate their success in the workplace.
5. Keep staff informed of how the patients are doing: Communicate good or bad patient outcomes to the team members that helped you care for the patient. Such updates allow your staff to know that their contributions to patient care are valued and that they are an integral part of the patient care team [1].

Dr. Shenkel and Ms. Gardner summarize their advice with the following:

“What [these tips] have in common is that they cost very little, yet can make a good job a great one – one that employees will stick with even if other options arise.[1]”

What do you do to keep your support staff happy? Let us know!

Nikki Rataj Casady, DMSc, PA-C
email@appcolleague.org