5 Great Incentive Programs for Veterinary Employees

by easyDVM

Incentive programs are a great way to motivate employees. But it can be hard to dream up a good incentive program. What you create may not engage your employees like you hoped, or they may have unforeseen consequences.

Constructing a great incentive program requires thinking intelligently about what your employees want and what your practice needs. Every practice will find that different incentive programs work for them, but here are a few ideas on how to motivate your employees to go the extra mile for the people and animals they serve.

1) Incentivizing Working Late or Weekends

It’s a rare employee who’s excited to come in to work on a weekend, or second or third shift. But especially if your veterinary practice provides emergency services, you may not be able to afford to let employees be choosy about the hours they work.

Forcing your employees to work undesirable shifts may hurt morale and reduce the pool of potential job applicants over time. But by offering your employees a little extra money for choosing to work at (comparatively) odd hours, you’ll see more employees eager to take these hours — which will improve the service you provide your clients.

2) Offering a “Beware” Bonus

One of the most common uses for an incentive program is to increase the number of examinations done. But this can be tricky: If you’re not careful, you may see an uptick in unnecessary examinations and procedures as your staff rush to take advantage of the incentive. Your bottom line may improve for a while, but your clients will definitely notice over time and react negatively.

But there are some preventative procedures, like dental examinations, that your staff should be doing with every animal that comes in for a check-up. By offering a “beware bonus” that incentivizes routine tests and exams that your staff may not be doing, you’ll dramatically improve the service you provide.

3) Implementing an Overtime Bonus

Some employees love the chance to take overtime. Others hate it — and because it’s voluntary, you may have a hard time getting your staff to work these extra hours in a pinch. By paying a little extra to employees who choose to work overtime, you’ll encourage more employees to consider the possibility who might otherwise pass it up.

4) Incentivizing Growth

Some practices incentivize referrals — and to be sure, referrals can be a great way to grow a business. But a practice that focuses too much on bringing in new clients without retaining the old ones can suffer.

When incentivizing growth, make it clear what your staff needs to do: Bring in new clients, provide excellent service to existing ones, and encourage clients to schedule check-up and follow-up appointments. By rewarding staff with a percentage of the practice’s growth every year, you’ll see your staff take an active interest in your practice’s well-being.

5) Creating Negative Incentives

Penalizing employee misbehavior, like tardiness or absenteeism, is risky territory. By disincentivizing too many behaviors or making the penalties too severe, you may see employee morale take a serious hit. And if an employee’s behavior is problematic enough that you’re considering docking their pay or removing some other bonus, there’s a strong case to be made that you should be considering firing the employee.

But one of the strongest arguments to be made for a negative incentive “program” is that your employees will sit up and take notice. They may yawn through a meeting about the importance of certain procedures, but if they know they’ll be penalized for not meeting your standards, they’ll pay more attention.

Creating a great incentive program can grow your practice and improve your service. By encouraging your staff to behave in certain ways, you’ll increase motivation and morale, and turn your practice into the thriving place you want it to be.

EasyDVM Practice Software is a cloud-based veterinary practice management software system. We pride ourselves in offering a system that is user-friendly, easy to learn for new team members, full-featured and elegant in its simplicity. Best of all, all devices, multiple users, all your clients and patients, always affordable..

Top 5 New Years Resolutions a Veterinarian Should Make

by easyDVM

The start of a new year is the perfect time to make positive changes in your career and personal life. As a veterinarian, the holiday period is a chance to take a break from your busy schedule, reflect on your work-life balance, and work out how you can more effectively work toward achieving your career goals. Here are five resolutions that could make a big difference to your life.

1. Look After Number One

Stress and burnout can prevent any veterinarian from achieving their full potential. This year, resolve to take care of your health and wellbeing. Why not take up an active hobby, such as dance classes, yoga, climbing, hiking, or jogging with a local running club? These hobbies can help to clear your mind as well as improve your fitness. If you think you don’t have time for hobbies in your busy schedule, think again: structuring leisure activities into your schedule could help you work more efficiently.

2. Make Time for Family and Friends

At the beginning of the year, make a calendar of all the important birthdays, weddings, reunions, family get-togethers, and other important events that you want to attend. Make a plan now that will allow you to attend these functions. Arrange for another veterinarian to cover your shifts or be on call during the time you plan to spend with your family and friends. As a busy professional, you need a strong support network around you to help you cope during stressful periods. This year, resolve to foster strong relationships with the people you care about.

3. Appreciate Your Team

Strong relationships with your team are also vital to ensure success in a veterinary career. Show your veterinarians, administrative staff, and technicians that you value everything they do by taking the time to praise them this year. Throughout the year, set aside time to listen to your team members and act on any ideas they have for improving the working environment. While you’re thinking about ways to appreciate your team, add National Veterinary Technician Week to your calendar in October. This is the perfect time to plan a party or social outing for your veterinary team to show how much you value them.

4. Learn Something New

Veterinary medicine is changing all the time, which means you can never stop learning if you want to stay at the forefront of your field. This year, put aside an hour or two each week to read about new developments in veterinary medicine. Consider attending a veterinary conference to network with other veterinarians and learn about the latest research.

5. Use Technology to Free Up Time

Technology can help veterinarians work more efficiently. For example, easyDVM veterinary practice management software can help you track and store medical records, invoice clients, and prepare reports. This software stores all your data in the cloud, which means you don’t need to worry about storing and backing it up yourself. When all your records are available in a format that is easy to access and share, you can spend more quality time interacting with patients, coworkers, friends and family.

Before January 1 rolls around, take the time to make plans for the year ahead. Purchase veterinary practice management software to help you work more efficiently, add important events to your calendar, and set aside time each week to appreciate your team and continue your education. These resolutions should set you up for an enjoyable and successful new year.

EasyDVM Practice Software is a cloud-based veterinary practice management software system. We pride ourselves in offering a system that is user-friendly, easy to learn for new team members, full-featured and elegant in its simplicity. Best of all, all devices, multiple users, all your clients and patients, always affordable.

Indirect Veterinary Customer Service: Technology and the Employee-Customer Dynamic

by Hunter Little

I’ve got to say, I am really proud of the title of this blog. If nothing else, I’ve managed to make something that is, at its core, a very simple concept and transform it into a seemingly complicated theory (there is always something humorous about over-complicating simple ideas). When I say “Indirect Customer Service”, what I’m really referring to is the notion of improving customer service by improving other aspects of your business that do not directly deal with customer service. That is to say, addressing customer service indirectly by addressing other areas of your business. Also included in the title is this notion of the employee-customer dynamic, or more specifically, the daily interactions that occur between employees and customers (we can even include employee-to-employee and customer-to-customer interactions).

My theory is quite simple, and is ultimately based on a few basic observations within the workplace. By implementing a few key technological improvements into the lives of employees (with the idea being that these technological installments are meant to make the employees’ work easier), the employees would ultimately be happier and more productive (I promise, this is not some kind of pseudo-communist plot). This direct influence on employees has indirect benefits for customer service. A happier employee is bound to have a pleasant interaction with the customer. If you have ever been introduced to any kind of behavioral-based psychology, then you know that people oftentimes direct emotions at outlets other than the source of their emotions. Thus, an employee that is, for example, stressed out about the complicated process for inputing a new client’s medical history into the medical records database may be more likely to imbue that employee-client interaction with their negative emotions regarding their practice software. The client ends up being the recipient of an employee’s frustration, and thus has a negative customer service experience. Yet, this negative experience had nothing to do with the client. Thus, because we failed to directly address a problem or inefficiency within the workflow dynamic (or the workplace as it applies to the employees), we have indirectly influenced our customer service.

This notion of indirect customer service was one of the driving factors behind the creation of EasyDVM veterinary practice software in the first place. We wanted to create something that was entirely based on a customer-centric model, emphasizing the importance of customer service before anything else. This means that, when we began designing the software, we designed it through trial and error, utilizing the input of our employees throughout the creation process. It is easy to design a software platform that is aesthetically pleasing and loaded with tons of features. but none of that matters if your employees can’t use it. Functionality and ease-of-use became imperative to the creative process behind EasyDVM veterinary practice management software. What I ultimately found was how this indirectly affected customer service. If employees are happy, then clients are happy. It may sound simple or a little overreaching, but I challenge you to try it. Like I have done before, I challenge you to put customer service at the forefront of your business, and see what changes come with that new approach.

EasyDVM Practice Software is a cloud-based veterinary practice management software system. We pride ourselves in offering a system that is user-friendly, easy to learn for new team members, full-featured and elegant in its simplicity. Best of all, all devices, multiple users, all your clients and patients, always affordable.

You, Your Veterinary Practice Software, and The People Who Actually Use It

by Hunter Little

Over the last couple of posts, we have been engaging in a kind of free-form dialogue about your practice’s software and if it really is the best fit for your practice in 2016. Really, I’ve been trying to challenge your digital/technological paradigm, and let you know that it is ok to demand more and expect more from your veterinary software platform. So far, I think it’s gone well (I hope you feel the same. If not, I haven’t given up on you yet). Yet, I think we can do better. To this point, the dialogue has been very two dimensional. What I mean is that it’s been a conversation about you, the practice owner, and your software. But, what about the people who engage with your practice’s software on a day-to-day level (i.e. your employees)? Sure, you probably engage with your software on some kind of a regular basis, but it may not necessarily be to the same extent as your employees, who are engaging with your software with nearly every task they do. Their jobs, assignments, etc. are intertwined with your practice’s software. So, it only makes sense that, at some point, they should be brought into the fold and be included in our growing dialogue.

If you’ll recalveterinary_teaml a post I authored a while back concerning millennials in the workplace, you might remember a point I made regarding the importance of inviting conversation and input. Whether this be in staff meetings, one-on-one teaching moments, or what-have-you, in this day and age it is important to incorporate the voices of everyone involved. Even though this may feel like an unwelcome or uncomfortable exercise, consider this: you, a practitioner, veterinarian, small-business owner, bring a unique point of view to the table. You see things from multiple vantage points, but at the end of the day, you see the bigger picture, the direction you want your practice moving, as well as everything it took to get there; however, despite the importance of your vantage point, it is feasible to assume that, sometimes, you can miss the minutia of your practice. This includes the small, day-to-day details and quirks that make your practice what it is. You may think you know all, and I would suspect that you do, as a person in your position should. But, the boss never knows all. It’s just a fact. Simply put, your position as boss limits your inclusion in the employee paradigm and experience. Therefore, your employees can bring a fresh set of eyes to the dialogue, a different perspective from your own. At your next staff meeting, ask your employees what they think about your practice’s software, and see where the discussion leads.

I pose this challenge to you, in part, because it was these very kinds of discussions that led to the creation of EasyDVM. We found that employees, despite saying they didn’t necessarily hate the old software, had a lot of minor complaints and suggestions for changes and improvements. Issues like having to manually look up and enter services and products for invoices, or having to navigate multiple windows just to set up appointments. When we added them all up, we realized that all of these small issues and complaints were affecting workflow and productivity. At the end of the day, nobody really spoke up because the old software had been around for a while, and it was just the way things were done. Phrases like “the way things are” or “that’s just how we’ve always done it” can be parasitic to a small business. Complacency and acceptance of the norm can lead to stagnation, leeching away at potential growth. It became clear that those who interacted with the older software on a day-to-day basis knew something the higher-ups didn’t. EasyDVM grew out of a desire to rise above this complacency. It is, quite literally, designed hand-in-hand with input from employees at all levels so that it matched up with the needs of those who would actually interact with the software on a regular basis.

So, I once again will challenge to incorporate your employees into the dialogue. Ask them what they think, and see where the conversation leads. It might surprise you.