Managing an Aesthetic clinic

If you’ve starting a medical practice or clinic, and now have several employees, you know how much your management will affect the reputation of your clinic and your results. All it takes is some misconduct or small error to ruin years of efforts, as you are in a business that has zero tolerance for mistakes. Here are some tips that will help you manage safely and efficiently your aesthetic clinic.

Align your practice to the current regulations

Any business related to health and patient care have a specific set of rules to follow to ensure your patient’s safety and personal data privacy. As a manager, you will need to spend a bit of your time every month to make sure these requirements are met:

• Make sure your patient record system is compliant with the current regulation
• Check if any other app you might be using respects these data safety and privacy standards, including your website
• Make sure all your employees have the right level of qualification and can demonstrate it
• Verify your different processes related to patient consent, information and agreement.
• Audit on a regular basis your hygiene standards and practices

Securing your business is the first step to proper management, but it’s also meant to inspire good practices to your employees and drive their attention towards these topics that are so easily forgotten after a few months.

Setting your quality standards and pushing them to your team

Beyond the legal requirements to run a medical practice, you will need to establish your rules and your quality standards. Not everyone has the same understanding of what good customer service is, how to inform a patient about risks, when to refuse to perform an intervention, etc.

These standards need to be crystal clear to your team, and it will take more than a memo to transmit them. A safe way to ensure these standards are respected is to run frequent audits in different areas of your activity, and that applies to very small practices with only a couple of employees as well. You also can run workshops, or have some employees in observation from time to time while someone performs a treatment.

These good practices and quality standards need maintenance and frequent reminders, and you need a realistic on-boarding process when hiring a new employee so they get familiar with it as soon as possible.

Coaching new employees is at the core of service quality

If you are working in a small medical clinic, either as a founder or manager, it is likely that you need to take both roles of team leader and coach. You probably have more knowledge than your new recruits, but even if you hire senior profiles you will need to make sure they meet your standards in terms of aesthetic or medical practice, but also in their relationship with the clients.

Technical knowledge is only half of what you should expect from your team, your role is to show them the way to excellent service. However, always showing how to do things and having to give all the answers has some shortcomings: it is exhausting on the long-term, and it prevents your employees to be empowers with their responsibilities and learn by themselves, which is always the best way to learn.

The best way to react when someone calls for help is sometimes to see if he can solve the problem on his own with minimal guidance. With a simple set of questions you might unlock more situations than  you’d expect with minimal intervention:

• Explain me the issue, and what you are trying to achieve
• What have you tried so far?
• What are your other ideas, have you thought of more things your could try?
• What is the main blocker, and how can we lift it?

It might take one more minute of your time to go through these questions rather than simply doing the task yourself, but it is the most efficient sort of help your can give as your employees will be everyday more autonomous and more likely to find solutions on their own. One common management mistake is to go to the quickest solution, which is very often doing things in the place of more junior employees as it seems to save time in the short term.

Beware of unhealthy behaviors and signs

Every organization is likely to encounter human relation issues at any stage of their development, and your aesthetic practice is no exception, even if you only have a few collaborators.

We have identified some risks that you should always keep an eye one as a manager:

Lack of contact between employees:

It is tempting to get people to specialize in their trade, as it’s often more efficient this way, to the point everyone works on his side with little to no contact at all. Even in a small team, sometimes you might not notice conflicts arising in these situations where everyone have built their own routine and defend their space. If you want to build a solid team that will last in time and develop trust, you need to create collaboration projects where people are invited to work together, share knowledge and responsibilities. If there are conflicts or a lack of trust at least you will be able to identify them and try to fix it.

Trust, gossips and respect:

You might notice in your team that some people don’t get the same recognition for their work from others, that the level of trust between them is low, or that there are rumors spreading about one employee. Although you can’t make everyone love each other, you can address as a team leader this kind of issue before it growth into actual conflicts. Few people like this role and know how to engage a dialogue, but the earlier you tackle these early signs of conflicts, the better your chance are to solve them.

Turnover in your team:

A great metric that you can use to objectively evaluate your leadership skills is the turnover in the team. Are your collaborators staying in your company or do they tend to quit after 6 months? If you notice a high turnover, it’s time to reevaluate the basics:

• Your recruitment and selection criteria
• Your team’s satisfaction at work (don’t hesitate to use external tools such as Glassdoor, or to conduct internal surveys to gather some insight).
• Reevaluate the job description, to identify what was going wrong. It might need rework
• Reevaluate the perks of working in your practice
• Do your employees feel they have a good balance between work and family life?

But beyond that, there are many details that will affect positively or negatively the mood at work. The decoration of the office and practice, your attention to everyone’s particular needs, the feeling the efforts are rewarded, etc.

Conclusion:

Don’t wait until a conflict bursts out in your team to act; your responsibility as a leader is not only performance, but also to build trust among the team, to make sure there is a high level of satisfaction, that people are happy to come to work and will do so for several years instead of constantly looking for better opportunities. A little attention to all those details every week will save you a world of trouble.