BY ERIN BLACK – SENIOR CONSULTANT, STRATEGY & BUSINESS OPERATIONS
As a leader in behavioral healthcare, you have an opportunity to spark excitement, engagement, and productivity among your teams. Front line staff can often feel that all management cares about are billable hours, which is how we often measure “productivity”, while what they want to do is to make a difference in the life of the person in front of them.
Both can be accomplished.
In our last H.E.A.R.T blog, we talked about employee engagement and the best way to keep staff motivated and feeling like what they do matters. This edition of the H.E.A.R.T series focuses on what leaders should be doing now that they been able to communicate to staff how much they and their work matters. Here are four practical ways to activate greater productivity.
1. Deepen your relationship with staff. People who love the work they do, will be more productive. Steve Jobs said the only way to do great work is to love the work you do. There are a lot of tools that you can use: Predictive Index, Meyers-Briggs, the Enneagram, the VIA survey all come to mind. There are also ones, like the Working Genius, that look more at a person’s work strengths more than behavioral drives. Pick one. Have your people take them. Get to know what gets them excited. Match that up to activities at work. No one goes into social work because they want to make a lot of money. (If they did, they were sorely mis-informed). People in both clinical and administrative capacities, want to make the world a better place and they will be more productive if that work matches up to their behavioral drives, personal motivations, and natural skills.
2. Create clarity. One of the best ways to achieve greater productivity is by creating clarity. What is the most important thing RIGHT NOW. Is it making sure all client notes are logged within 24 hours; or is it getting the word out about a new mobile outreach program; or is it streamlining the onboarding process? Whatever it is, everyone needs to be clear so that staff can prioritize their workloads. It also helps staff to say “no” to things that are not a priority and lend their expertise to things that are. If everything is important, then nothing is important. Clarifying priorities allow everyone to focus on the most important tasks first. We often assume everyone knows because we mentioned it once in a meeting, but clarity requires consistent repetition.
3. Take time to walk around the office. This may seem obvious, but when was the last time you walked around the office to see how your staff are doing? Or if you are not located with them, giving them a call/getting on Zoom? You may know it as management by wandering. These touch points serve multiple purposes. First, are your staff doing what they are supposed to be doing? It is the job of a leader to trust but verify. This will allow you to determine if the staff are working on what’s most important and/or if there are any distractions you could eliminate. Second, it will give you an opportunity to see how they are doing personally and feel valued, and a way for you to solicit information from them about how things are going, what’s working, and what isn’t. It will also clue you in to any toxic cultures lurking in corner. As a MIT study of more than 600 companies reported: “Toxic culture was the single best predictor of attrition during the first six months of the Great Resignation. It was 10 TIMES more powerful than how employees viewed their compensation in predicting employee turnover.” Thirdly, it gets you up a moving, connecting to those you work with; this sets a good example for your staff to do the same and opens the door to collaboration and communication, and the development of relationships which, consequently, contribute significantly to happiness and well-being.
4. Lay the groundwork for vulnerability-based trust. This allows for healthy conflict and accountability and is the basis of all successful endeavors. Ask questions, model curiosity, admit mistakes. Allow for small moments of learning and innovation. As research from HBS professor Amy Edmonson has shown, we optimize performance and learning in groups when both accountability and psychological safety are present.
4. Self-care – cut yourself a break. These principles can also help you as an individual. By keeping your internal critic at bay, you can create the right psychological conditions to accelerate through periods of rumination or self-doubt more quickly. There are many other ways to provide self-care, too: pack a healthy lunch; exercise before coming to work; take a walk with a co-worker at lunch. As a leader, you set the tone; if you don’t do it, neither will they. And to be more productive, it’s imperative to tune into what you as an individual need to be productive. This could also include blocking time off of your schedule to get important work done, husbanding your first 30 minutes in the day to get organized, removing electronic devices from your workspace, prioritizing exercise and drinking water. When you do this, your staff will, too, and you will all be more productive for it.
None of this is rocket science, but it does take focus, persistence, and a plan. There are a lot of tools out there that can help you better understand yourself and your staff, that can give you a language to have better conversations, more effective collaboration, and healthier conflict.
This blog is just one part of the H.E.A.R.T series. To read the rest of the series, please visit our website or click on one below.
