Many therapists are nurturers by nature. We get into this profession to help people better deal with life’s difficulties. A certain kind of nurturing is part of the job. We guide clients, thoughtfully and carefully, to cultivate a strong self-understanding; to be more aware of their own thoughts, impulses, actions and reactions, and use that awareness to better cope, connect, and succeed. We help them find strategies to nurture their interpersonal relationships, too, be it with friends, family, a romantic partner, or their kids. A Psychology Today article from a few years ago described the therapist role as being like a “diligent and nurturing gardener.” So if there’s one thing therapists get, it’s nurturing.
Running a group therapy practice also requires a different kind of nurturing. Funny as it may sound, you need to nurture efficiency. Yes, a concept like “efficiency” may sound a little cold in the context of therapy—an operational concern that should come in a distant second to more client-focused considerations. It’s important to understand, though, that managing an efficient practice is what allows you to give your clients the focus they deserve. A well-run group practice is a well-run business, and running your business well cuts down on problems and inefficiencies that prevent you from helping clients to the best of your and your clinicians’ ability. Each step you take to run your business better is a step to cultivate and nurture a more efficient practice.
The following tips for nurturing efficiency in your group therapy practice will help you ensure that managing your practice gets easier and easier, so you and your therapists can focus attention more fully on your clients, where your attention should be, rather than always dealing with operational hiccups and their snowballing impact.
Part of running an efficient group practice is creating an environment clinicians can be happy to work and thrive in, because clinician satisfaction is clinician efficiency. Happy, comfortable clinicians are more excited about their work, and clients can feel it.
So how can you create such an environment for the clinicians your group employs? There are any number of managerial strategies that are as appropriate for group therapy as for any business. Providing clear forms of evaluation can help make clinicians feel like they’re valued and are being given a fair chance. Hiring with clear criteria and knowing you’re working with people who will meet your expectations and match your ethos is likewise important. Being flexible when necessary as regards scheduling, for instance setting clinicians up to provide telehealth services for those clients who prefer to use it, can also make for a mutually beneficial, mutually happy working relationship. It might even be worth your while to take a general business management course or two, to add new skills to your managerial toolbelt that you might not have built if your career has been spent exclusively seeing clients.
It comes down to setting your trusted clinicians up to do their best work. As you see what’s effective, you can iterate, building up initiatives to promote and reward your staff and nurture efficiency, rather than demanding productivity.
Understanding business is a big part of running a group therapy practice, and these days so is understanding technology. Whether it’s implementing the right secure telehealth solution, utilizing the right billing program, or deciding whether to use a popular office communication tools like Slack, it’s important to have a clear idea of the value proposition, how well it works for group practices in particular, and how much time and stress it will save you with respect to the cost of the investment. And just like with your best practices for managing and rewarding clinicians, you can always improve your tech stack by carefully monitoring what works and what doesn’t—what is saving your clinicians time on otherwise laborious administrative tasks—and use that information to nurture an ever more efficient practice.
Using the right technology is important, and one technological solution that is proving its particular advantages at more and more group therapy practices these days is virtual clinician onboarding.
Clinicians not being clear on policies, expectations, and best practices can be a huge source of unnecessary headaches. It leads to misunderstandings and honest mistakes, which cause inefficiency, burdening your business, stressing out everyone, and even reducing the value of your services to your clients. Clinician onboarding solutions have emerged as a powerful tool for group therapy practices to remedy this.
Clinician onboarding solutions consist of a repository of short videos, created by experts in the field, explaining everything a therapist just starting out in a group practice needs to know. A good onboarding solution assures that every clinician in the group starts with a clear idea of best practices for everything from client care to paperwork processing. Clinicians are primed to manage the “little stuff” and best practices become habits, rather than burdensome tasks that require reminders. So all the minor slip-ups that accrue due to clinicians overlooking or forgetting things during their busy days, just don’t happen. That means a whole world of time and resources, which would otherwise be spent backtracking and addressing problems, and all the negative energy that can cause in an office, are traded for efficient, effective, smooth-running operations.
This improves not just clinician performance, but clinician satisfaction—thereby making for workplaces that are reliably more efficient.
Guiding people to better understand themselves, nurturing their self-awareness so that they can face the world confidently, whatever comes at them, is what therapists in a group practice aim to do. The more efficient a group practice’s business operations, the better your clinicians can do that (and the happier and more fulfilled everyone, including your clients, will be!)
So get started nurturing efficiency with thoughtful management strategies, well- implemented technological solutions, and effective onboarding. You, your clinicians, and most importantly your clients will all appreciate how an efficient practice provides a more nurturing environment for everyone.