Strategies for Dealing with the Staffing Shortage
This week Paul analyzes his recent interview with Lorraine Riche to extract some unconsidered but useful strategies for weathering this staffing shortage that is affecting all of us.
Full transcript
Generated from the episode audio and lightly edited for readability.
Good afternoon and welcome to another episode of Paul Martin's Crucial Conversations. Today we are going to discuss opportunities for action based on our interview with Lorraine Riche from Talentcare. She gave us a lot of great strategies and tactics that can guide us in becoming a company that can efficiently and effectively recruit, hire and retain both professional as well as frontline ancillary staff in our businesses. And you all know this. This is certainly one if not the biggest challenge in our industry today. So, first, while your professionals are integral to the success of your business, I know they're absolutely integral, physical therapists, physical therapy assistants, we also need to create strategies to continue to develop the support staff around your professionals.
That's actually a strategy to keep your professionals more aligned, more engaged, and feeling like they're being supported. So, as Lorraine mentioned, ongoing training, seeking continued feedback from that, your frontline workers, your top frontline workers, and then creating more opportunities for efficient and effective communication of those frontline workers and the professional and the professionals in your practice is absolutely key to retaining the best support staff. You don't want support staff to feel as though they are just support staff. You know, we often advocate what we call a front back workg groupoup session and those can happen every other weekly.
It's a very short meeting and it's established you know with an agenda each week and it's how the communication between the frontline workers and the back physical therapist physical therapy assistants can improve the patient experience. So that meeting is focused on how do we improve the patient experience. By doing that, we're getting our front and our backline workers involved in creating that experience for the patients. Another thing that Lorraine brought up that I think is really important on how to re attract your best staff is how many of you out there today can tell your story?
Can you and your staff tell why working at, I'm going to make it up, XYZ physical therapy is such a special place to work and what happens to you when you come and work at XYZ physical therapy. Really think those things through because I can imagine there are some really unique and special qualities from working at your physical therapy business. And this is essentially ever uncovering you and your staffs. We're going back to the Simon cynics why. Why do they do this? Why do you do this?
Why you do this? They should know why you do this, which will in some respects incorporate why they do this. And this needs to be said over and over again. Going out to find staff. When you're talking to new potential staff, tell them that twominut story. It has to be told on your website. And we all need to be able to do it consistently. So the story is consistent from you as the owner to your staff to frontline staff to professionals to everybody within the company.
Now another tip and strategy that Lorraine talked to us about is we have to make the application process easy. There are many resources out there on how you can make a very simple, easy application process for your physical therapy company. Remember, these young phys physical therapy therapists are resourceful. They're technologydriven. They understand that if they fill out an application and hear from one company within an hour and the next company takes over a day, they're going to see who is more eager eagerly recruiting them as well as how easy is it to fill out an application.
If it's a three or four page application process, many therapists will go look for another one and do the six, you know, six openings and they'll fill out that one instead. Another tip that she gave us is in this current market, look, you're going to be competing for the best talent. If there is a therapist out there, trust me, they have three or more opportunities that they are looking at probably simultaneously. So we need to create strategies. So in that initial interview, we're actually building a relationship.
Now we all as physical therapy business owners who have been developing relationships with our physicians can develop relationships with your patients, can develop a relationship on that first interview. You not only want and this was a great point that I think that Lorraine brought up. You not only want to discuss the pros of coming and working at XYZ physical therapy but also what may be some of the challenges or maybe even cons. Is it a long drive? But maybe they can listen to some music and listen to some books on tape.
And try to work through those consc. They want real solutions to the issues that they are facing. And don't be hesitant to talk about those in that initial interview because when you do that, you're going to be developing a relationship. Finally, create a very dynamic this is once you've hired someone. Now, now we're talking about retention. You want a very dynamic onboarding and ongoing training program for all new staff. This sounds like a mountain to climb over. There are many resources out there that will provide you with this structure and you and your staff can then make it yours.
So use the resources that are out there, but then make it yours. And when it becomes yours, you're going to feel really good about the training that is going on. Get your staff involved. You know, in our experience, owners that invest time and focus in developing the processes that I have discussed are having a lot of success attracting and retaining staff. I talked to a physical therapy business owner, four clinics the other day, kind of Midwest, a little more towards the west, Midwest West. He said he's overstaffed by one full-time therapist, but they're glad that they're overstaffed because they're getting many new referrals in one of their newer offices where they just shifted a therapist.
He's doing all these things we're just describing. So again, utilize your staff to help build these training programs as well as the onboard as well as the ret going out and finding program finding physical therapists, especially your managers and those outside resources and create a team to develop these processes. Don't do this alone. I apologize. I got a little tongue tied because this stuff gets me jazzed. You know pulling together a team within your company and saying we are going to develop the best way to go out and attract and then bring in and then retain our staff and I want your help in building this program.
It's very powerful. I really appreciate all of you joining me today. And if you want to talk to me about today's show or any of the other topics that we've covered, just click below. Let's talk. Thanks and have a great day.
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