At The Heart Center in Kingsport, Tenn., you might find the pope trailed by some nuns, encounter a giant cow with inflatable udders, or spot a cross-dressed bride traversing the halls of the 26-physician practice.
It's just Halloween at a practice that prides itself on being a fun place to work — as well as offering expert patient care as one of the largest cardiology practices in the state.
"It is all in good fun. Your patients come in and everyone is smiling," Harry Turner, MD, says of the Halloween attire. The cow costume, in particular, "really brings the house down," he says.
Running a successful practice means more than reducing accounts receivables and having a low claims rejection rate. To Turner, it also means throwing social events for his staff, rewarding employees for a job well done, and keeping them connected to the happenings in the office through a monthly "Town Hall meeting."
All the efforts are aimed at fostering trust among the employees and physicians, which creates an "atmosphere where you have long-term loyalty from your employees, and where your patients feel comfortable," Turner says.
"The relationships with your coworkers are what makes the work satisfying," he adds. "Part of the joy of doing what you are doing is working with good people who are happy to help you."
Some practices celebrate Halloween, and most have annual holiday parties and picnics. Used properly, these events can help bring your staff together. But Turner and others say additional efforts, including hiring the "right" people and having frank, regular discussions with staff, can build a true community within a practice.
Come Together
In a busy practice, it is easy to focus more on patients and putting out day-to-day business crises, and less on how well your staff is getting along. But that is shortsighted. An office where there is a lot of fighting, either openly or under wraps, ultimately "will take up a lot of physicians' time. There will be poor morale in the office and that gets transferred into how patients perceive the office," says J. LeBron McBride, PhD, MPH, a family therapist and associate clinical
professor at Mercer University School of Medicine in Macon, Ga.
"An office is more than one person doing the billing, and one person over here doing something else. How those people interrelate and how they get along really sets up the dynamic" for how the practice functions, says McBride.
Problems can emerge and fester amid a "crisis mentality," where information is only shared in "bits and pieces," says McBride. "It can keep people in a defensive mode."
One key to enhancing office relationships is to view the group as a family. And a critical component of any healthy family is open and honest communication, adds McBride, who is also director of behavioral medicine for the family practice residency program at Floyd Medical Center in Rome, Ga.
Turner agrees. "Communication is what holds a practice together, whether you are talking physician to physician, or physician to patient, or physician to employee," he says.
With this in mind, his office holds quarterly "Town Hall" meetings. The head of each department, such as human resources and information services, as well as the president of the group, give a brief update, with word on new hires, changes in benefits, reminders about passwords. These meetings always end with a question-and-answer period.
"You don't want your employees hearing about things from the public before they hear them from you," Turner says.
