According to Google, ‘rudeness’ is defined as ‘lack of manners or discourtesy.’ Such insensitive and disrespectful behavior at work affects people’s health and performance. It thus results in a downward spiral. According to a study, it was found that rudeness results in:
- Reduced team performance
- Inability to think and manage decisions
- No communication among team
- Inability to treat patients in complex situations, resulting in hurting patients
A disappointed and demotivated team cannot treat patients properly, and that gradually spoils your practice reputation. Since you always want your practice to grow, you need to manage your reputation and acquire more patients. For this, you need to market your services and take care of your staff who further takes care of patients.
Be Patient-Friendly
Your patient-centric practice should offer an exceptional experience at every point. It starts with searching your practice and continues through the end of the office visit. You need to have an interactive and informative website with a patient portal. In order to offer good treatment, you need to have a patient-friendly and motivated staff. For this, you need to:
- Forbid negative comments from everyone in a position of power.
- Ensure norms and values are accepted by every staff member.
- Show regard for all team members.
- Have practice goals and the path to achieve them recognized by all staff members.
- Check that relationships of staff members with each other reflect your practice’s culture.
There can be no excuse for not showing basic courtesy. If you ignore this, your staff won’t be able to deal with patients’ issues.
Offer Satisfaction
For the growth of your practice, you need to have patient satisfaction as well as staff satisfaction, because either of them has the power to damage your reputation, especially in the world of the Internet. Review sites such as Yelp, Healthgrades, Yellow Pages, etc. have a lot of content to educate your target audience about your practice. Regardless of how genuine the reason, dissatisfied patients don’t hesitate for a moment to flock to the Internet to express their frustration – subsequently, ruining your reputation. This frustration does not depend just on treatment but also includes appointment setting, the office environment and staff behavior and interaction with patients. Any rude behavior among staff will make them unhappy and demotivated, and that will gradually reflect in their behavior toward patients.
Other consequences of rude behavior with employees are:
- Breakdown in communication
- Mistakes entering registration details
- Delay or no follow-up on insurance claims
- Not actively responding to patient calls
All of this negatively affects patient care and the interpersonal relationships among your team members. Further, the staff is divided into two groups, one who works for you and the other who works with you. So it is essential for you to make clear to all your employees that they work with you so they feel respected and empowered. Only then you will get cooperation from your team and ideas that can take your practice to a higher level.
Issues of review spam are also an after-effect of rude behavior from staff that forces patients to write negatively about you on the online review portals and deteriorates your hard-earned reputation.
To conclude, remember your behavior with your staff is directly proportional to their behavior with your patients. Happy patients will do word-of-mouth marketing for you and write well about your practice on your various review and social media platforms. This will gradually grow your ranking on search engine results.