“Change management” is lingo more associated with the corporate world than with mental health. Still, it’s a phrase you might soon start encountering more in the therapy world, because recent years have been as much a time of transition for therapy practices as any other organization—maybe more. In part, therapy is experiencing a transition because more people, from all different backgrounds and at all stages in life, are seeking out well-trained therapists for guidance living more confidently and happily. Small group practices are expanding to handle this client influx. They need more office staff to do it. At the same time, the introduction of new technologies to manage new needs means both old and new office staff might need new skills, and be faced with new responsibilities. Virtual onboarding is critical to any practice managing this fast-changing environment.
Virtual onboarding grants employees access to video content that details everything they need to know about their role in your office. A therapist’s practice wants to make sure that that office staff can quickly and easily get a feel for the day-to-day demands, to provide seamless support for therapists and preserve a friendly, productive environment for clients. Virtual onboarding can make that a reality.
Your office staff is the first face, voice, or virtual presence your clients encounter when they make a therapy appointment. Having them prepared to give helpful, pleasant service to clients, and highly-effective support to your therapists, is paramount to a well-functioning office as your practice grows. The following tips for office staff onboarding will ensure you maximize the value of any virtual onboarding resources you use.
Use Virtual Onboarding to Keep Things Easygoing
In the past, you would hear about big, well-funded healthcare institutions that would over-hire—hiring enough administrative staff so that no individual, especially those in more entry-level positions, would get stressed out to the point of impacting patient or client care. Therapy practices, especially these days, are rarely afforded such luxuries. With more clients and limited resources, both state-funded enterprises and small group practices usually have to do more with less.
But a lean work environment doesn’t have to be a stressful one. It’s a fact that it’s less stressful to work in an environment where everyone knows their responsibilities. And in therapy, establishing this kind of environment is very important. The difference between a stressful environment and a stress-free one is palpable to any incoming client. They can feel it in the air, read it in the posture of a staff member or therapist. A bad interaction with stressed-out office staff might even unconsciously color their mood going into their session. The same goes for therapists. They’re human too, and cannot give their full attention to clients when they are distracted by the internal politics of a chaotic office.
In any office, little mistakes spiraling into big ones is a prime source of stress. By and large, these little mistakes are unintentional—someone doesn’t understand their role, or they forget or never learn an important process. Having staff use virtual onboarding eliminates such little mistakes. So even if you’re running an office with fewer resources, human and otherwise, than you’d have on your ideal wish list, you can still keep stress to a minimum. Not just by directly espousing the values of maintaining a pleasant, low-stress environment, but by using onboarding to assure your staff know exactly what they’re doing, preventing a huge list of stressful situations from ever happening.
Use Virtual Onboarding For Everything New
If you’re bringing on new office staff to support a bigger practice with more therapists, you’re probably undertaking some additional transitions alongside that personnel expansion. You might be implementing telehealth services, moving into new, specialized areas of therapy, replacing outdated office software with new, more user-friendly solutions, or making any number of other operational improvements. Each of these changes can require that office staff learn something new.
Virtual onboarding can address any process change so that staff—new or old, administrative or clinical—can easily get up to speed on expectations and best practices. And any time in the future when you add a new piece of software or a new service offering, revamping virtual onboarding to encompass it should be part of the launch—so you get all of the benefit and none of the confusion from whatever new tool, process, or practice you’re implementing.
Manage The Transition, Don’t Let The Transition Manage Your Office
More people working in your office demands more meticulous organization. The bigger your practice, the more small oversights can throw things off in big ways. For instance, if you have one person managing the front desk, they might be able to get away with having their own methods of filing. If they schedule a client incorrectly, they might be able to catch the issue and easily correct it. But if you have five people working at the same desk, one person’s unique filing system is a headache for the other four, and one small scheduling error can mean much more than five times the confusion.
The fact that it’s a bigger task to manage a bigger office should not, however, scare you away from scaling your practice, or bringing on more trusted, high-performing office staff to be as much a part of your operation as your therapists. Whether you’re moving slow and bringing in one new part-time person to work in the office, have to bring a whole lot more administrative staff than you planned for on a quick timeline, or are launching a suite of new tech solutions alongside expanding your office, the complexity of the transition doesn’t have to put you in a frazzled position—not if you have a good virtual onboarding solution to depend on.
Virtual onboarding will have your office staff working as a single team with a single way of doing things no matter what changes may come. It’s the way to make the most out of your newfound boom in clients, setting the stage for therapists to do their best work, and for clients to have the experience they deserve, every visit.
