There are obvious costs associated with the loss of an employee – recruitment, training and salary. Normal calculations put the average cost at 150% of the employee’s annual compensation figure. That’s a big number! However, every time an employee leaves, there are numerous “hidden costs” that many never consider and, while not as obvious, still have an adverse impact.
Slippage. When an employee is missing, there is work that isn’t getting done and that has a cost associated with it.
Ripple effect. Coworkers need to pick up the slack, which keeps them from focusing all of their efforts on their work. Management’s priorities also suffer as they have to devote time to finding and training a new employee, and sometimes covering some of the lost employees responsibilities.
Patient loss. With the loss of the employee’s knowledge and experience comes the potential for patient satisfaction to be impacted. Patient commitments and service levels often suffer. The patient is eventually impacted again by having to deal with the challenge of bringing a new contact up to speed on their specific situation.
What is the real cost of YOUR employee turnover? What happened the last time an employee left - voluntarily or involuntarily? Did your service quality go down? Did the stress level in the office go up causing other employee issues? Were there things that dropped through the cracks? Did you lose patients as a result? How long did it take to get back to the ideal service level....if ever?
More importantly, how can you avoid this situation in the first place?
Effective employee management requires a little luck and a lot of effort. Managing patient care, the demands of a business AND staff is extremely difficult and time consuming. The concern is always if spending time on one is sacrificing your ability to focus on the others. Unfortunately, there are never enough hours in the day to do everything that needs to be done. One option to try and limit the tremendous cost and impact of employee turnover is to hire someone to handle the staff’s oversight to help ensure their performance is acceptable, their benefits are competitive, there are no employment laws being broken and that the team is working like the well-oiled machine it needs to be.
Another option is outsourcing some of your responsibilities to a 3rd party vendor. Depending on the size of your practice, your outsourcing options might include: IT support, payroll, billing (in whole or in part) or human resources, just to name a few. In most situations, outsourcing has definite advantages, but it does require a certain level of trust between the physician and the selected vendor.
Do your homework and invest in the right solution. Let us know if you need help getting started. We would be happy help you determine which of these options would work best for you.
