How To Get Staff Buy In

Join us as we unravel the keys to unlocking your staff's true potential and fostering an environment where everyone thrives. From empowering subject matter experts to navigating compensation challenges, we dive deep into creating a culture that aligns with your business goals.
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Don't miss out on this episode because we share personal anecdotes, practical tips, and a fresh perspective on leadership that will leave you inspired and ready to elevate your team to new heights!
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Website: businessoforthobiologics.com
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Transcript

Intro
Hey, I'm Dr. Ariana DeMers. I'm an orthopedic sports medicine surgeon, and I have successfully integrated orthobiologics into my busy practice so that I can provide a continuum of care and treat patients who are in the Gap. The Gap is this gray area in orthopedics where standard conservative treatments have not been effective, but surgery may not be warranted. And we usually tell our patients, come back when it's worse. What? These are your patients coming to you for help. Orthobiologics is that solution that can fill the gap and help you treat your patients who are in your office looking to you for help. Orthobiologics can also be an excellent treatment for frustrating problems without good surgical outcomes. This podcast will help you create the orthobiologics business that will make you love your job again. We will focus on the value of orthobiologics, patient selection, how to talk to your patients about money, office setup, and other logistics. If this is something you've always wanted but don't know where to start, join me in "The Business of Orthobiologics" podcast.
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Dr. Ariana
Hi. We're going to get started on The Business of Orthobiologics, and we're going to talk a little bit about our topic of how you get your staff bought in. I've always had these questions. I have a great team, I talk a lot about how they're all the way bought in, and they're so committed to this project that-- you know, I get these questions like, how do you get your staff bought in? I've been thinking about this, and I wanted to share some of my thoughts about how this process happens. As you know, I'm Dr. Ariana DeMers, and I am a board-certified, fellowship-trained orthopedic surgeon. I also am the current President of IOF and an educator and a trainer. I have successfully integrated my orthobiologics practice in a rural environment and mostly cash practice at this point. I wanted to share my experience. You have to consider your why. Why did you move your practice to Regen? Why did you move your practice to a cash-based practice? And then realize that everybody wants the same thing. Everybody wants that why. So everybody wants in their job-- they want respect, appreciation, autonomy, freedom, joy, excitement. They want to be able to come to work and be like, man, I really made a difference. Man, we're doing a really good thing. You want to be bigger than yourself and really be part of something really big where you're making huge changes in people's lives. So your job as the leader is to create the vision and the confidence and convey that vision and convey not only your confidence but your employee's confidence. So I'm going to urge you to consider to manage differently. I want you to empower your employees to be the subject manager experts, to push them to perform at the top of their scope, and coach up or cut bait and decide that it's not the right fit. And oh, by the way, nobody likes to suck. Nobody. You don't like to. Your employees don't like to. Everyone wants to come and do a really amazing job. And so if they're not, we have to figure out why. So I really have on my team, I have people who really just want to come to work. They want to do a good job, but they don't want to be the expert, and they're willing to take maybe some more menial tasks, scanning the files or making the phone calls or confirmation phone calls, cleaning the bathroom, emptying the trash, those kinds of things because they don't want to do a little bit more. The next category of employee is subject matter expert. That means when they come to work, they are the expert. Maybe the filing system, Sally is the expert at how the filing system works, where you find things, where you put things, and the whole strategy behind it. She's a subject matter expert. My nurse is the subject matter expert on all things nursing. Oh, by the way, when I tell them to push to the top of your scope, she's not actually a nurse. She's a medical assistant who is performing at the very top of her scope as my nurse. That really empowers her to be the subject matter expert of all things nursing, all things patient care. Anything that comes through the phone that is patient care is directed to her, and she is in charge of that. Then we have the opportunity to look for low-performing or people that are not performing to the level that you would think they could be performing to. This is your job to identify what's happening and why is this happening, and then coach them up and give them opportunities to succeed at their job. If they are clear about what their opportunities are, if you're clear what their skill set is and or what's driving them, and it still isn't working, then it's not going to work. Be very clear that it's not a "them" problem, it's not a"us" problem. Just like we don't marry everyone that we date, there's got to be a right fit. And so ultimately, we want to make sure that it's the right fit from a culture standpoint, from what I'm asking them to do standpoint. And if it's not going to fit, it's not going to fit. And we very kindly-- and with great empathy and compassion, say, hey, it seems like this is not a right fit. Either I haven't asked you to do the right tasks or I haven't put you in the right job, or my managerial style is not proper for your desires. It is very clear in my business that my managerial style does not jive with everybody. I'm a very laissez-faire manager, and I am really good at vision and guidance and I'm dreaming up these big hair brain schemes on how we are going to succeed at changing people's lives. I am not an expert at the nitty-gritty, and so I empower my employees to take the big picture, say, I need you to get this task or this goal completed. Now, do I walk them through that? I don't. If you are an employee who needs me to walk you through every step of the way and hold your hand every step of the way, then you're probably not the right employee for me. That's okay. You probably would be better with an employer that is much more top-down, much more detail-oriented, and wants you to just execute each detail in the whole grand scheme. So please understand that there's somebody for everybody, right? Just because they're not right for you doesn't mean they're not going to be an amazing fit for somebody else in a different business. So empower your employees to be the subject matter experts and to perform at the very top of their scope. Help them trust themselves and allow them the time and space to succeed. If they come to you with a problem and you solve that problem for them, you have not demonstrated that you trust them to solve the problem themselves. You have not demonstrated that you want them to take the time and space to succeed in solving the problem. So make sure that you give them the opportunity to work out that problem-solving skill and a problem-solving way of approaching your business. And then when those problems get solved, it's not on you. You didn't solve it, they did it. Give them the kudos and help them trust themselves that they are making the right decision, and then they will continue to trust themselves to make the right decision in your absence. I get a lot of questions about compensation packages. Gosh, I'd love to pay you, but I can't. I'd love to hire her, but she's outside my price point. What we've done in our office is find alternative ways to pay them without money. You really do have to consider their values. You can pay in time, you can pay in flexibility, and you can have alternative considerations to address pain points as to the deep why they work. Right? If you give them a price point or a salary and that doesn't seem to be helping or like they can't take the job or they're disappointed and they were hoping for promotion. Maybe a better question to ask is, what would that allow you to do if you had a different price point and if you did have a different pay raise? What does that get you? What does that allow you to do? Oh, well, it allows me to pay a car payment. Oh, that allows me to take care of my grandmother one day a week. Oh, that allows me to have a discretionary spending account because my spouse is not in line with my spending habits, any of those things. Then you can start to think, okay, if the reason that you want the raise is to be able to pay for daycare, can we address that? Can you have an onsite daycare? Think outside the box on how you can solve these problems non-monetarily. I had my office manager who was looking for a raise, but she was also valuing autonomy and the ability to go on vacation. She's a young, vibrant woman. One of her passions was snowboarding. She was lamenting that she wanted to go snowboarding, but she didn't have a season pass, and she really wanted to do all these things. I bought her a season pass to our local ski hill. The outlay of cash was less than the raise that would have been going on. That being said, the fact that she now can go snowboard anytime, she's not limited by money, she can just go as much as she wants. I've given her the flexibility to go snowboard on the weekend, and I know that that's her value. That is her reward. Instead of working on Friday when I'm out of town, she can go snowboarding on Friday and not only have the flexibility and the ability to not have to pay for the snowboarding, but she has the freedom to do that as well. I want you to forget this thought of, I'm the boss, I'm telling you what to do, now go do it. I think that people thrive in an environment with collaboration. I do think that when they know the why behind the business, it is really helpful and they really can get behind the mission. If you can be transparent in your business, in the money, your personal life, and what's going on, kind of a whole you approach and collaborate with your employees. I have no idea how they get the sale done or how they run this schedule to make it seamless for me every day. When I'm trying to make changes, if I just top-down make the change without understanding the nuances and their expertise, without getting their opinion I'm most likely going to misstep and make some decisions for the business that are probably going to be detrimental. Definitely collaborate with your employees and be transparent. This doesn't mean that you're going to let your employees run your business. You're the boss. You set the vision, set the tone, and set the big goals and visions for how you're going to get your business done. Then they are feeling like their mission is your mission and your mission is their mission, and they will execute for you because they know the why behind the business. The why behind my business is to give the patients the right diagnosis and then get them back to their healthy, active lifestyle by any means necessary. We also have a value in our company that we do the extra. Yes. Let me help you, and.. we give impeccable care to our patients. If we know that that's our mission and our vision and our goals and our values, then they know that they can make a decision and say, does this make it easier to give impeccable care to our patients? If the answer is yes, they can make the decision yourself, and you don't have to make that decision. So please erase the don't F it up mantra. As a leader and as a business owner, you're always like, do this really perfect and don't F it up. Really, I think that's a negative energy. What you put out in the universe, you get back. If we can try to empower our employees and not have them running scared that they're going to mess up. I don't want to mess up. I don't want to mess up. I don't want to mess up. I think in my business, and I think you can borrow this as well, there's always a solution. Everything is workable out of bowl. I tell my employees, there is nothing that they can mess up that we can't fix. There's always a solution. I tell this story about my nurse. She also was running the blood to create a platelet-rich plasma. She had a mishap in the lab. The entire container exploded and PRP was everywhere. She came to me and she was just crying and so stressed out. She was thinking, this is the end of the Earth. I was like, it's okay. She's like, I ruined it forever. I said, it's just blood. It's just PRP. Let's just call the patient. We can always just draw more blood. Do you see any problem with that? She's like, well, no, I just feel bad. I said, hey, why don't we give her a call and just let her know the situation that we had a malfunction with the equipment and that we need to draw more blood and that she'll be willing to come back and give a little bit more blood. It worked seamlessly. She then understands that even if she thinks that she has ruined something in our business, it's fixable. We can work it out. It's not a problem. That's part of that confidence piece that you have empowered your employees to work on your behalf. If something goes astray, if something goes awry, don't worry. I can work it out. We can fix it. I do use this in my personal life as well. I always tell my daughter, don't worry. We can fix this. You give it a whirl. If it breaks or it doesn't work, there's always a solution. Everything is workable and outable, and we can always find a solution if we run into a problem. I think that that's very empowering to go and take risks and take chances to be able to not have to wait for me to tell them what to do. So these are some tools that I use for my employee buy-in into my company and my business. So I do think it's really critical to have clear culture and values. What do you value? What do you stand for? What are your non-negotiables in your business? One of ours is a family first. There's nothing more important than your family. If you have to take time off to take care of your family, that's a given that I expect that you are going to take. You are going to prioritize your family over the business. Business is business. I would prefer that you prioritize your health and your family first. Additionally, we take impeccable care of our patients, but that does not mean at the detriment of our employees and our physicians. What has to be good for the patient also has to be good for the doctor and the employee. If all of those checkboxes are not done, we don't do it. Those are our clear cultures, our values. You have to find what resonates with you and really embody your culture, embody your values, and use your values to make decisions for your business. Does this fit with our values or not? That can help you with employees as well. Is this employee fitting with our culture, with our values? If the answer is no, then that's that time where you need to cut bait and you need to say, you know what? You do not embody our values. You do not fit with our culture, and this is not the place for you. We think you are a good person and you are talented. It's just not the right fit. To that point, I think using tools like the StrengthsFinder, like personality tests, is really important. The Clifton StrengthsFinder is one that we use that really helps us to round out our team. We don't want a team of people who have the same strengths as me. I want people on my team to have strengths that are my weaknesses, and so that they can really shine in that light and take my weaknesses out of the equation. Additionally, we've done the personality test. It's 16 personalities. It's a free personality test, and it is uncanny how right they are. It feels a little creepy because it's like, oh, my gosh, how did you know me? Have you been stalking me in my closet or what's going on? But those two have been really helpful for us to understand where people are coming from and what their strengths are, and then we want to play to those strengths.The third one is what I call Job Audit for Joy. I have my employees write down all of the things that they do during the day and then rate the top five that they love and the top five that they hate. And then what we do is we tell everybody, these are my top five I love. These are the top five that I hate. And we then take those top five and say that they hate and get rid of them. Because really nobody needs to be doing tasks that they hate. We need to find a different way to do that. In one of our audits, she's like, oh, I hate this. My other employee goes, oh, my gosh, I love that. That's one of my favorite things to do. We said, great, you're now in charge of that task. Then we had a couple that nobody liked to do, and we hired a second front desk person to do those tasks. We interviewed specifically for the tasks at hand, not just because she was a good person or a nice human, but because we needed those tasks to be done. The next is the one, three, one. If they have a problem, they need to come to me with a very clear definition of the problem, three possible solutions, the best solution that they think would work, and why. If they come to me with a problem, we're going to say, have you done the one, three, one? Have you clearly defined it? Come up with three ways that this could be solved and the best one that you think it is. Then my last one is a frequent 360 Review. What that is, this is a review of them, their goals, what they're doing well, and maybe some missed opportunities, but then also my goals for the company and maybe missed opportunities on my part that I have not helped them to be their best self at our company. When we have our reviews, I have them fill out an entire sheet of what their goals are, what their personal goals are, what their professional goals are, what they've done to bring them to their goals, what two things have they done in the last month to get them closer to their personal goals, what two things have they done in the last month to get them to their professional goals, and then what do they see as some missed opportunities. Then we also list, how can I help you achieve your goals. And then we reverse that and say, okay, these are our company goals. This is what we've been doing as a company to get there. This is where we think of missed opportunities. And then these are my opinions on maybe some things you're doing well to get to your goals and things that maybe you've missed an opportunity to achieve your goals. That really helps to bring it outside of the, Oh, you're doing a bad job. A missed opportunity is such a nicer perspective and say, you know, you didn't quite hit the mark yet. That was a missed opportunity, but those opportunities exist. I think that that's definitely something that can be done. That is really helpful for our employees to know where they stand and what opportunities are next between the next review. So thank you so much for listening. Hopefully, this has helped you in helping to get an amazing team on board and get going. Your team is so, so important. You can't and shouldn't do this alone, and go get them.
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Dr. Ariana
This has been "The Business of Orthobiologics" podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you want to know more, please join us on the website "PRP-Now.com" and click on the FREE Masterclass. Also, don't forget to SUBSCRIBE to this podcast to get more guidance on integrating PRP in your busy practice. Bye for now.
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