Frustrated by personnel issues?
Competency management solves the problem
By Kathy Mills Chang and Kevin Harkins

Have you had days when you seemed to spend all of your time on everything but your patients? Or days when you spent all of your time treating patients but had to stay late to catch up on personnel issues, such as:

• Hiring a new front-desk CA to replace the one who quit; or
• Deciding how to handle an insurance specialist who is timid about calling insurance companies to get reimbursements; or
• Counseling a CA who is questioning if she would be happier becoming a full-time X-ray technician instead of working in a “dead-end” job; or
• Dealing with the unprofessional demeanor of one of your staff, as reported by a complaining patient?

Although you may consider these time-eating issues to be a normal part of running your practice, every minute you spend working on — or reworking — time-consuming personnel management issues detracts from your business and your bottom line. This is a problem.

NEEDED: A SYSTEMATIC APPROACH

The solution is competency-based management — hiring better by attracting, developing, and retaining talented people with the right skills and attitudes critical to creating and operating a thriving, lucrative business.

Competency is defined as “the quality of being adequately or well qualified physically and intellectually.”

Competency-based management systems can be traced back as far as the Roosevelt administration, but they became popular in the 1980s and 1990s and remain so today. The theory behind them is sound and simple: Through study and observations, determine the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and abilities — competencies — that are required to perform each job successfully. Then hire, train, and evaluate people based on those competencies.

A competency management system customized for your chiropractic office clearly identifies your chiropractic workforce performance needs, as well as your existing team’s capabilities. And, when properly implemented, the system becomes the foundation for all your workforce management decisions.

The basic focus of competency management is to align each team member’s capabilities with the specific requirements of their respective jobs. The jobs, in turn, help the organization fulfill its mission and purpose.

CREATING A SYSTEM

To create a competency-based management system, follow four steps: Collect data, analyze it, develop a model, and implement the process.

1. Collect job-related competency data. Sit down with some of your more experienced team members and discuss the various tasks and accountabilities that are required for each job in the practice. Suggestion: If you are a new practitioner, find a mentor in your community who will help you sort through your needs for each major position in the office.

2. Analyze the data. Your goal is to identify the competencies. Determine the knowledge, skills, attitudes and/or abilities needed to accomplish each task and the responsibility associated with it. Verify your thoughts by asking your proven performers why they are always successful and/or how they get the results they do.

3. Organize the competencies. Develop the means and methods to use the competencies to assist you with your various human resources duties. You are building a competency model that will allow you to use this new-found information in all your personnel management dealings.

Armed with this information, you can use the competencies to develop questions to ask job applicants, locate or develop training aids to help hone skills, and create job-performance measures to evaluate your employees’ abilities.

4. Implement the model. The power of your new management system is that all of your HR functions — from assessment to performance management, and from professional development to pay and compensation — are now linked together by the unique competencies associated with each job in your practice.

When it is necessary to hire a new team member or train existing members, you can take actions and make decisions based upon the competency criteria you’ve developed.

The return-on-investment of designing your own competency management system will quickly outweigh the time you invest in the effort.

By implementing a competency management system and determining and understanding the competencies required for each position within your practice, you can quickly and efficiently solve a problem or avoid the problem altogether.

Let’s look at the personnel problems presented in the beginning of this article and see how competency-based management can alleviate them:

• Personnel change. When you are faced with sudden or unexpected personnel openings, create targeted, competency-specific job advertisements and interview questions that allow you to quickly assess each candidate’s capabilities and identify those best-suited for the job.

• Timid employee. Teach the insurance specialist to master the communication skills necessary to be persistent and efficient when collecting insurance reimbursements. Develop professional development training plans and focused-learning events targeted at improving specific skill or ability deficiencies, and increase your current employee’s overall job performance.

• Dead-end job. Increase your employee retention rate by fostering career-path development. Keep your best employees happy and thriving in their jobs when you use this technology.

• Poor performance. To evaluate an employee’s performance, use subjective criteria designed to help both supervisors and employees recognize satisfactory and/or outstanding performance, as well as identify and document (as necessary) performance shortcomings and weaknesses.

Whether you are a new doctor getting ready to open an office or an experienced doctor with multiple team members, this know-how will revolutionize the way you manage your practice team.

As you identify and use specific competencies for developing each team position in the practice, your office productivity will rise and individual performance will soar.

Kevin Harkins is the CEO of Harkcon, a management and leadership development consulting firm. He has more than 20 years of experience in human resources management including recruiting and hiring, compensation, training, leadership development, retention and vision enrichment. He can be contacted at kharkins@harkcon.com through his Web site, www.harkcon.com.

Kathy Mills Chang is a senior coach with Breakthrough Coaching. She can be reached for comments or questions at info@mybreakthrough.com or by calling 800-7ADVICE.