I was talking to a multi-clinic operation last week. They are running EW4 in five offices and it looks like the receptionist in each office gets overwhelmed with tasks.
What happens is that WSIB in Ontario requires that they call each patient for a 6 month follow-up.
Additionally they have an internal rule to get people in for clean-and-checks or for regular testing and reprogramming, which generates repeat business.
These and great practices.
Staying in control of third party obligations and using your client base to generate additional sales are very important.
The downside? An inflation of tasks in their system for the people who actually have to do them.
So what's to be done?
How can you stay on top of things, make sure things are getting done, but not overwhelm your staff?
Let's take a look at a few principles:
1. Set each task for only one person whenever possible. This way you don't pollute other people's inboxes with tasks they look at and say "this is not for me". Task pollution ends up decreasing the relevance of the other tasks and it kills motivation.
2. Many tasks are similar. Categorize the tasks using types, tags or buckets depending on your system.
3. Work on similar tasks in batches. For example:
- if you want to write a birthday card to each patient one week before their birthday, do a weekly mailer using a standard format instead of print individual cards for each
- if you want to call people to come back for regular clean-and-checks you can also create a mailer. But if you want to avoid the risk of being considered junk mail then you can start a recall list. Then whenever a team member has some spare time between things, they can just take the next person on the list and call
If you're running Ear Works 4 there's a button in the task list to send selected tasks to mailers. It's designed precisely for this purpose.
4. Encourage a "getting things done" approach to task management for your team. This basically suggests to always keep your todo list clean, organized and to work on the small tasks right away. The rest needs to be scheduled and dealt with when the time comes. Check out David Allen's book when you can.
5. Take the pulse of your team as often as possible. This can happen quietly (like running the "Efficiency Report" in Ear Works) or through organized meetings with each team member. What you want to find out is:
- how many tasks do they have every day?
- do they know how to deal with them?
- are they overwhelmed with things to do?
- do they have enough direction on what to do next when they have a spare moment?
Bottom line, you want to find out bottlenecks that can get your entire operation slowed down and create a lot of negative emotion in the team.
I mentioned bottlenecks. What are these?
Bottlenecks happen when a key person receives a lot of tasks that he/she can't deal with properly. All the dependant processes will the stall, things will fall through the cracks, customer service quality drops and mistakes start happening more and more often. A burnout is not far away.
Keeping an eye on all the signs will help you keep things flowing smoothly and your team happy. Which will translate into customer satisfaction and a prosper business.
Success!
