Patients depend on healthcare offices for service every day. Because your office may not be have especially long hours and you may close on the weekend, you must maximize all the available time for patient care. A solid employee attendance policy will make this easier.
To prevent problems in the office, you must create policies that serve everyone who works for you. The doctors, nurses, technicians and clerical staff all a have job to do, and you cannot allow a lack of staff to prevent patients from making their appointments. The five suggestions below will help you formulate a fair attendance policy for your medical office.
- Schedule everyone differently. Create a policy that addresses time-off for your doctors, nurses, technicians and clerical staff. The clerical staff must be balanced every day, and you may block off days that your clerical cannot miss. You can have technicians miss certain days when certain types of appointments aren’t scheduled, and your nurses may miss other days where they’re not needed. You can have yet another policy for doctors that determines how they’ll cover every appointment every day. Just make sure to create policies to address the specific job of the person requesting time off.
- Set schedules several months in advance. You can have technicians miss certain days when certain types of appointments aren’t scheduled, and your nurses may miss other days where they’re not needed. You can have yet another policy for doctors that determines how they’ll cover every appointment every day. Just make sure to create policies to address the specific job of the person requesting time off.
- Balance the roster every day. Your office must have a balanced roster every day that you are open. Requests for time off may come at any time, and you may trim down the roster to a certain extent every day. Ask yourself how many nurses you truly need on a given day. When time off requests come in, reduce the numbers to match. Keep making reductions until you can no longer let people off work, and remind your staff members of the schedule changes. When you have many people request the same days off, you’ll simply remind everyone the need for a full staff on those days.
- Be as flexible as possible. Everyone in the office has a family to tend to. By keeping a good rapport and open communication with your staff, you’ll make it easier to keep the office running during emergencies. Let people go home when there is nothing they can do and ask others in the office to pick up the slack. Everyone in the office will be more likely to chip in for the greater good.
- Establish clear holiday hours.Keeping reduced holiday hours is less disruptive when you clearly communicate them to your staff. Announce your holiday hours in the spring and ask your staff to submit requests early. Accommodating requests is much simpler when you give this much advanced notice. The holiday time off requests you receive must be handled delicately in your medical office, and these five tips will prevent trouble among your employees. Even though you may want to give everyone time off, you can’t serve patients with an empty office. Fostering teamwork as suggested above will keep everyone happy.
