Dec. 1, 2021 — Tom Bowen has been in the optical industry for nearly four decades. A founding principal of Williams Group, Practice Coach, Optometric Consulting Systems, and the Silvermark Agency, he is now the founder and CEO of Thrive Practice and Life Development, based in Roca, NE. To learn more about Thrive, head to the recent #EBConvo.
 
EB recently checked in with Bowen for strategies for establishing a winning team culture. Below, Bowen shares part two, offering a few specific strategies his clients are implementing to do just that.
_____

• Another one I particularly love (and have always recommend as part of the yearly marketing plan) is practice teams putting on a major charitable event. I’ve long advocated doing this annually, but it has been particularly helpful to culture and difference making to community during the Virus Era. I love watching the outcome and the energy generated by teams building steam with their event year after year. We often invite patients and their families to participate, and even a few times, to bring the dog! And by the way, we see tons of new patients from this—what I call “Good Old Marketing Rule” No. 6: If it’s good for the patient (community in this case), it’s good for the practice!

• Some colleagues are giving staff their birthday afternoons (or mornings, if more applicable) off. This one can bring some logistics challenges and expense, of course (and simply may not be feasible when we’re short-handed), but wow, do teams LOVE this!

• A strategy I’m seeing in more and more practices is expanding staff benefits in creative ways. This does not have to mean expanding expenses. We recently significantly expanded staff benefits in a client practice that offered some help toward health insurance by setting up benefits for their staff in a neighboring dental and veterinary practice. [It] didn’t cost any more than our time to discuss this idea with these neighboring professionals, and now we have a great little perk that shows we care and we’re doing what we can. And of course, we’re providing the same for their teams in our practices!

• When clients do promotional events in the practice (trunk shows, etc.) we work hard to include staff in the planning and follow their lead. We also have team presence prominent at these events and make it obvious we’re proud of and love showing off our team! Community recognition of our team in their workplace helps add some lasting self-fulfilling prophecy to “this is where I work.” Culture, colleagues. Culture.

• I love the strategy of having a practice business card tailored specifically for recruiting (include your culture statement on the back) and encouraging all team members to hand this to people out there in the community whenever the opportunity presents itself (and let’s be creative about such opportunities!). When someone has provided good and earnest service in your life as a customer, compliment her/him and let her/him know she/he is exactly the kind of person we love having on our team (that’s how I like to say it!). We might even occasionally hand this to patients we feel are a special fit with our desired workplace in the same way of speaking.

• We’ll often form a practice intern position in client practices and constantly recruit for this. Don’t hesitate to bring on more than one intern at once if the opportunity presents itself (it never rains and then it pours, right?), and don’t feel like you need all the details perfectly in place before acting on this. We are in a time when we need to get recruiting strategies out there working, even if they aren’t finely polished, and evolve as we go. Something close out there now is often better than perfect later. There are companies who make a living on this concept right this minute, and they have evolved this into their main long-term employee recruiting system. It works!

• Don’t be as specific about duties when recruiting (nor overly specific even when hiring), in this new normal. Keep it more to a serving and workplace mentality: meaningfulness and satisfaction of our work, changing lives, philosophy of community, etc. As a general rule, the more specific we are about responsibilities, the fewer opportunities we have. There are times we prefer to limit applicants, but these are largely not those times.

• In all client practices, we keep on keeping on with those weekly team production reviews. Not only do they cause an unstoppable bias toward practice growth, but also an ownership-like self-fulling prophecy (i.e. “we are a team, this is our practice, these are our goals, this is how we’ll cause impact...”)

 
This seems a strategic time to revisit our working definition of management. We define management at Thrive as choosing to control outcomes. Like most subjects of management, managing culture is about making that choice...that decision. Then, it’s powering that decision with a set of initiatives that drive that decision to fruition. This is management by objective, as opposed to management by hope; and it works a whole lot better, friends. Especially in these times.
 
That’s a wrap, colleagues! We’ve managed a pretty comprehensive conversation these recent posts on recruiting in lieu of hiring, purpose in lieu of position, and culture in lieu of just outbidding competitors for your staff.
 
So, let’s conclude with this…People come to a team, stay on a team, or leave a team because of culture—perceived culture from our recruiting efforts, then proven culture from our leadership. And they will no longer tolerate faking it. If it’s not real, they’re gone.
 
Today’s generations of the workforce value the experience they have working with your team and serving your customer much more than they value the concept of employer loyalty. That can be frustrating, but I have to be straight with you and say I believe this can actually be a really good thing!
 
For more insights from Bowen, visit EB's The Week newsletter.