Being agile in the workplace is not just about being physically adaptable but also mentally adaptable, because let’s face it, your business is going to get some curveballs tossed its way.
With circumstances constantly changing that affect your clinic, the industry, and now more than ever, the global community – it’s essential to be able to pivot, reposition and respond to changes in your private practice environment.
For physical therapy practitioners and office staff, consider these different ways to ensure that your business and staff can keep their head on a swivel in the workplace:
8 Ways to Stay Agile in Your Private Practice Workplace
1. Be Open to Change
Agility is often an issue of adaptability. If you can respond to a change in circumstances and move from there, you are already more agile than your competition. For your physical therapy business, these changes can include everything from new technology to changing patient care and documentation standards.
2. Listen Closely
The agile among us keep their ears open to new trends, people or patterns. Such listening skills are how they are quick to respond to changes and new working methods. If you are not listening to what is going on in the physical therapy industry or within your own walls, your patient care programs or your employee culture could already be falling behind.
3. Be a Collaborator
Agility in the workplace is often a team effort. It’s not about seeking glory or credit but about best responding to environmental or operational needs with your staff. Collaboration is essential across every role in physical therapy practice. Don’t let hierarchy get in the way; if someone is leading, support them.
4. Be Proactive
Your organization should value agility and encourage suggestions and adaptations to emerging ideas and programs. Does your physical therapy practice encourage proactive attitudes among the therapists and office staff? If not, there is some work to be done. If your team does not feel comfortable coming forward with solutions, the climate needs a shakeup.
5. Learn to Communicate
Agility, like leadership, can’t survive as the lone characteristic of a single member of the practice. To promote agile thinking within your physical therapy practice, you need to establish and maintain lines of communication between different areas of the business. Ideally, leverage an LMS program to communicate a succinct, comprehensive message for the various areas of your practice, like onboarding, management training, front desk optimization, etc.
6. Maintain Discipline
Creating an agile work culture isn’t just about establishing it and letting it go – the owner has a big role to play here. You need to maintain discipline – the kind that shows you practice what you preach. This starts with having the right policies, systems and personnel in place to properly enforce it. Just like how we need the right credentialing to stay compliant with operations, our personnel need owners to set the right culture and then lead by example.
7. Build Resilience
Sometimes a plan, a person or a program doesn’t work out. Being resilient in the workplace means bouncing back from any challenges and roadblocks and seeking new solutions based on these new learnings. Your team should assess when something doesn’t work and pivot accordingly – it’s an essential way to display agility at work.
8. Always Be Learning
Hand-in-hand with expertise and experience is the process of learning. We can’t all start at the top, so we must figure out what works, what doesn’t, and what needs to be adjusted to develop our agility mindset. This mindset is especially important when working with patients and their critical needs. Take advantage of these moments where your on-the-job agility and decision-making can influence and improve the lives of your patients.
Get More Personnel Management Training
Discover more ways to optimize your practice via our interactive, virtual career development platform that has changed the lives of practice owners and their staff by bridging the gap from what you learned in Physical Therapy school to what you must know to be a thriving, successful private practice. Now, the programs and certifications you need are just a click away!
