Part 2: The Amicable Staff Exit – Important Advice for Healthcare Business Owners & Associates

Opening a clinic next door can be inherently risky for all parties on all levels — financial, reputational, legal, strategic. Non-compete kilometre radius restrictions amidst legal contracts are blunt instruments intended for worst-case scenarios and often ‘don’t hold up in court’. A restraint period however, can hold firm and help an existing clinic retain patients. It’s important to seek legal advise when constructing enforceable agreements.

My advice for the clinic owners… 

If you’re a healthcare business owner looking to proactively manage defection risk, you should consider these 3 things:

1. Be transparent, clear and respectful with your expectations.

Keep your team close and be familiar with their behaviours. Clinic culture functions as a kind of surveillance by virtue of pattern recognition. People are naturally tied into the rhythm of each other’s behaviour. Closed doors that are usually open, someone who suddenly goes quiet when they usually speak out, the sudden creation of a personal/professional social media account; you need to use these deviations from the norm to assess when someone’s motives are changing. When engagement is lacking, so too are their priorities. This is the best time for principles to connect with team members… see the strokes before the camel’s back breaks.

2. Make sure that practitioners feel integrated.

Use social events, group meetings, virtual lunches, or whatever works to help build solid relationships amongst your team.

3. Have short-term, regular check-ins to help you notice changes in work habits 

For example, lack of engagement, cultural shifts, communication avoidance.

“GOOD LEADERS IMPROVE THEIR TEAM MEMBERS’ ENGAGEMENT, RETENTION, AND PERFORMANCE; BAD ONES HAVE A CORRESPONDINGLY NEGATIVE EFFECT.”

It can be said that ‘people don’t leave practices, they leave clinic owners’.

• Be a good mentor
• Empower your team
• Create an inclusive environment and express interest in team members’ success and personal well-being
• Be productive and results-oriented
• Create a safe place where people are encouraged to share communicate
• Listen to your team
• Help your employees with career development and discuss performance
• Inspire a shared vision and strategy for the team
• Support growth, diagnostic reasoning, evidence based action and clinical skills so you can advise the team
• Collaborate and offer roles and responsibilities
• Create chains of accountability, delegate authority, and welcome contributions
• Make strong decisions and be clear on your expectations
• Plant the greener pastures

So how do you retain patients?

Focus on providing an amazing experience for them. Patient’s are less likely to follow another practitioner if they already have a loyal relationship with the clinic. Your admin front-line have a huge impact here. A patient who feels connected to the clinic at multiple touch points is less likely to leave. Make sure your patients know that they are valued. Have a solid handover process and a strategy in place to ensure their care is continued at the highest level.

What about the rest of the team?

Emphasize the gravity of defection amongst your team—not as a threat, but as a reality. When it comes to leaving and setting up another practice, make standards of behavior crystal clear. No one should be able to say they didn’t know what “pre-soliciting patients” meant, for example. When someone is leaving my clinic to start they own venture, we show our support as a team. Use previous staff exits as an example of how well it come be done.

My advice for the leaving practitioner…

For employees, the message is clear.

A practitioner cannot solicit patients or colleagues to move with them to another clinic. Where the boundaries are blurred are in contractor arrangements. Make sure your agreement is clear. Policy is culture.

For both the business owner, and the practitioner leaving it is a gamble of trust, credibility, and human capital. Such moves may destroy relationships—with former colleagues, patients, and connections —and impair the practitioner’s effectiveness for years to come.

The psychological ownership of having ‘MY patients’, can lead to some behaving in a risky fashions when it comes to colluding. We’ve heard stories of alarmingly aggressive and improper pre-departure behaviours around communication with patients and staff, along with use and access of clinic/patient information. I’ve heard of many mistakenly assuming they can freely engage with patients and that non-compete restrictions ‘don’t hold up in court’. If you think like this you’re missing the point and validating sh*tty behaviour.

Litigation isn’t the thing to be feared — it’s loss of reputation and relationships that can be just as damaging.

Questions around leaving—confidentiality, non-compete agreements, intellectual property, and the like—are complicated and vary by country and industry. The number one thing to keep in mind, is that until you give notice your duty is to your existing practice. This means you can’t speak to your patients or team members about the move until that resignation is public… nor can you ‘take stuff’ from the clinic… nor can you lie.

This is trickier and, in some contractor agreements more counterintuitive than it seems. ‘Taking stuff’ is not a legally precise term — again, consult a lawyer about what ‘taking’ and ‘stuff’ means in your particular case. Breaking into a clinic after hours would clearly feel wrong, but so too is downloading files or transferring patient details from one folder to your phone. I’d hope this behaviour would set the crickets in your conscience chirping in the same way. Similarly, if a work relationship has evolved into or grown out of a friendship it should feel disingenuous and sly to continue working with a clinic owner as if everything is normal when you’re actually planning to leave.

Mind humanity. Many might do what’s right for their career, but understand that in doing so they can damaged old clinic’s interests and mentor relationships. Some might consider a resignation to be a legal separation, but that does not always guarantee emotional closure.

DO NOT USE YOUR RESIGNATION AS A MOMENT FOR VENGEANCE, A FANTASY OF ‘YOU HAD THIS COMING’.

People are highly sensitive right now. They are going to remember how you resigned and how you held yourself during your exit. The close-knit allied health community means that you will eventually run into someone who knows what happened. Gossip can spread like a virus too; make sure your story reflects your integrity.

Finally, a shout out to the clinic owners who started their journey at Western Region Health and who have since successfully built their own success. The Boss Lady you know and remember will always be proud of you.

As Warren Buffet says, ‘we plant the seeds so that others can enjoy the shade’. Strive to be a boss and leader that others respect for longevity, not just because you once processed their pay.

Bringing you my best,

Jade Scott xx

PS. If you missed the back story to this blog, you can check our Part 1: Ex-Staff Leaving & Practitioners Taking Patients – Why Allied Health Needs To Aim Higher here.