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Consistency key in giving staff time off

Practice Management. By Mike Norbut, amednews staff. Jan. 26, 2004.

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Now that the holiday blitz is over, your office has probably regained some sense of normalcy. Staff members have returned from vacations, schedules are back on track and people are getting back into their professional grooves.

Sounds like a good time to start thinking about time off again.

As physicians become wrapped up again in clinical work, issues such as time off for office staff members can easily be pushed to the back burner. But if they're not handled well, those seemingly innocuous requests can damage both the practice's fiscal health and office morale.

The key to balancing the needs of staff with the health of your practice is to be prepared for the events before they occur, health care consultants said. Whether it's a policy manual that spells out how and when employees can take vacation, or a general protocol for handling work when a staff member is ill, it's better to anticipate problems than to hope they never happen.

"It's hard to apply hard-and-fast rules to every situation," said Rick White, CEO of MedaPhase Inc., a consulting firm in San Antonio. "You have to know your office staff, know their morale."

While other professional offices usually have enough employees to cover for absent colleagues, some physician practices do not share that luxury. Limited numbers of employees can make each request for time off a debate about who deserves it, who will cover the work and how the practice will cope.

One way to make sure that work in the office will continue is to require advance notice for time off and cross-train employees so they can cover for a co-worker if pressed into service.