Staff meetings, team meetings, departmental meetings….whatever you call them, how are they working for you? Are they really necessary, or just a big waste of time and money? After all if your practice has email, an Intranet of some sorts, and maybe a monthly newsletter, your bases are covered….right? Not so fast!
Today is my first day at my desk in a little more than three weeks! The middle of March kicked into high gear with a visit to Fort Lauderdale to consult with a group of four practices. Upon my return, a key member of my management team was out with major surgery, shifting some additional duties to my plate. Then my local managers’ group, the Veterinary Management Association of Indiana hosted our first quarterly workshop of 2011 with national speaker and consultant Bash Halow, CVPM of Halow Consulting as our keynote speaker. As one of the organizers, I was busy whisking Bash around Indianapolis for his whirlwind 22-hour tour of Midwest hospitality! Then, I found myself off to San Francisco, immediately followed by the a trip to the windy city for the VHMA Legal Symposium. I made it home promptly at midnight last night….whew!!
On November 1, 2009 our practice opened an employee daycare. Since we happen to be in the business of taking care of pets, most people assume it’s a daycare for our employee’s pets. Every time I mention that we have a daycare, I get a “double-take” from the person I’m talking to….”you mean the employees can bring their dogs, right?” is the question that is almost always asked.
Our daycare is for human children! We like to call is BRAC Buddies, since we refer to Broad Ripple Animal Clinic as “BRAC”. Most people are amazed that a small business can pull this sort of thing off. In the end, a little ingenuity with a dash of luck, and the blessing of our practice owner resulted in a free-standing, fully-licensed private childcare facility that is just steps away from where we do our daily work of caring for the pets of Indianapolis.
Yesterday, I overheard one of my managers comment to another, “How did we ever function without BRACpet Connect?” She was referring to our intranet which I built on a Ning platform approximately 18 months ago. With this platform, we are able to communicate to the entire team in a single place that is searchable and dynamic. This is important to us because we now work out of five buildings spread out over a one mile radius in Indianapolis.
If you’ve been using Facebook for at least six months, you should be well aware that Facebook is an ever-evolving, ever-changing work-in-progress. This can be frustrating to many people, as it seems just when we get used to how something works, Facebook changes it up on us.
This week, we saw some major changes for Facebook Pages. These Pages are the business pages we all use to manage our practices’ social media presences. The exciting thing about these new changes is that Facebook has addressed many of the most common frustrations we, as administrators, have voiced. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the best conversations I was a part of at the VHMA Management Exchange last month, was one led by Jim Nash, MHA, CVPM on the Health Care Reform. There has been a great deal of controversy surrounding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Law, and as managers and practice owners we are all a little confused about what it will mean to our practices and our teams. Read the rest of this entry »
Almost a year ago, I wrote a post after an extremely frustrating snow day here in Indianapolis. In that post, “Good Enough and Other Forbidden Phrases” I described a day where my team didn’t seem to “get” the importance of the small details that become larger problems. Today, is another snow/ice day. After two days of solid freezing rain and sleet and snow, our city is covered in several inches of slippery danger. I made it in at 9:00am and inched my way across the glassy parking lot to my office. Read the rest of this entry »
Tomorrow, the 2011 VHMA Management Exchange begins. For me, and a group of dedicated volunteers, the exchange actually began today. Between the VHMA Board and the CVPM Board, a full day is already behind us.
Giving back to an organization like the VHMA is important to me, because I believe the VHMA has provided me with a many opportunities over the past ten years. I found my current position as a Hospital Administrator for the Broad Ripple Animal Clinic on the VHMA Career Network nearly eight years ago. That job posting was the first in a series of VHMA-related opportunities. My next gift from VHMA was the opportunity to sit for my CVPM designation. In 2004, I became a certified veterinary practice manager after passing a rigorous oral and written examination in Key West. My next challenge was to speak for the first time to a group of my peers at a VHMA Management Retreat, which has now become known as a management exchange.
The Management Exchange is a gathering of the smartest, most progressive group of Practice Owners and Managers in North America. It’s a venue for sharing ideas, and encouraging one another as we all face the same problems and daily demands in our practices. The quality of conversations one encounters at an exchange is well worth the registration fee. If you haven’t been to an exchange, put it on your calendar for next January and make a point to attend. I think you’ll be surprised by what you find.
This blog has been on the back-burner for longer than I had hoped, but I’m happy to say that “I’m back!” after finishing up with the release of my new book, Social Media for Veterinary Professionals: Online Community, Reputation, and Brand Management. If you’re in the veterinary industry, and interested in how you can use social media to benefit you and/or your practice, I hope you’ll read my book. It was a year in the making, but my journey of experimentation and learning about social media has actually been on-going for more than three years now. For an independent online review, please see Dr. Janet Tobiassen’s blog at About.com. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m a manager, or rather “the boss”. I have to make decisions everyday that affect people’s lives. I try to think in terms of the best interests of the business as a whole, weighing many factors from how a decision will affect team members, all the way to how it will ultimately affect the bottom line. I really love my job, but there are some days where it’s the last place on earth I want to be. Those are usually the days when I have to fire someone.
This isn’t a “woe is me” type of post where I tell you how bad I have it having to let someone go. I know the person on the receiving end is having a worse day than me, but I am a human-being and I do truly care about the people who are part of our team. If it has reached the point where I am escorting someone to the door, it should come as no surprise to them because we have taken steps to try to work out the issues, or they’ve done something that is so blatantly in contempt of our standards or culture that I have no real choice.
