How to Retain Quality Clinicians: 4 Questions to Ask Your Employees

The “Great Resignation” likely isn’t slowing down anytime soon, and many group practice owners have shared with me the difficulty of retaining quality clinicians as their employees’ priorities shift and a changing economic landscape impacts big life decisions. 

Finding quality clinicians who want to grow within your practice can be challenging. Maybe you’re noticing that your team’s resilience is starting to rupture in the face of crisis and chaos. You want to see them engaging with clients, managing their caseload, and contributing to the shared vision. So, what do we do? More workplace perks? More accountability and structure? 

Actually, the more you invest in your working relationships with your employees, the better your retention will become. Clinicians want to work in group practices where they feel their contribution matters. They want to support your vision while being able to contribute what they uniquely have to offer. 

This is why mastering relational leadership through cultivating a culture of trust is what combats turnover, overwhelm, and disengagement. 

How to Retain Quality Employees

Having ongoing conversations about your work culture and your employees’ future will support you in making data-informed decisions that are in alignment with your values and also fact-based. The bottom line: relational factors are key indicators of team health and practice success for group practice owners. 

I suggest asking the following four questions one-on-one with your clinicians on a quarterly basis. Asking these questions can be part of your clinical supervision, utilized alongside performance reviews, or done as part of your employee engagement strategy. 

Before we get into the questions, there are two important considerations to take into account. 

The first: for these conversations to be effective, a level of safety will already need to be established. You can only invite your employees’ transparency, not require it. If there’s a lack of safety, your employees’ answers will be minimal and short. If there’s trust, they will be honest about their joy and candid about what’s not working. 

And second: all feedback is good feedback. You want their honesty! Receiving feedback about your group practice will take courage and vulnerability on your part. As you engage in these conversations, resist the urge to get defensive or latch on to any specific feedback. 

Here’s a script to help you productively set up the conversation with your employees: 

“It’s important to me that we live our values here at our group practice. I want our work culture to be fulfilling, a place where you can grow, and most importantly, where you can feel supported. We get so lost in the day-to-day that I wanted to do something a bit different today and ask you some questions about your experience working here. This will help me see where we need to grow within our group practice and also help me understand where my attention needs to go. Although I can’t promise a certain outcome, I do want you to know that I will take all your feedback seriously and plan to follow up with you. My request from you today is candor. You would be doing our practice a service by providing me with your honest insights and experience. Would you be willing to do that?” 

Four Questions to Ask Your Employees

Once the conversation is set up, be sure to document their responses. This information will become critical in improving processes, developing training, and reinforcing culture within your group practice. Now, the four questions. 

1. What brings you the most joy in your work right now?
This might seem like an obvious question, but the truth is our employees’ joy and purpose change. It’s essential to understand what lights up your employee right now. Does this employee love working with a specific population? Perhaps your practice can specialize further. Does another employee love running groups? Running groups could be an opportunity to scale. 

Does your employee like to support with administrative tasks or enjoy running meetings? Perhaps this allows you to assign this employee more leadership opportunities. Understanding what drives your employees and their natural strengths will help you identify the leadership potential inside your practice to support its continued growth.

2. Are there ways you can see yourself growing within this practice?
This question supports you in understanding the possibilities for an employee. Your employees can only grow as far as you’ve envisioned. I often work with group practice owners who are mapping out their employee journey for the first time. Much like a client journey, you want to clarify the positions inside your practice and how you would like their position to evolve. 

By knowing where an employee is looking to grow, you can then look for further opportunities for them to practice and develop additional skill sets. Employees want to stay in a group practice that invests in their growth and allows for professional exploration. 

3. What’s one process/policy that you wish could be modified and why?
Finding the gaps in your practice is beneficial. When you map out a new process or policy, you might know what you’d like to see, but reality can paint a different picture. Here’s your opportunity to find out if the tasks assigned are taking too long or where the communication breakdown might be happening. 

Perhaps you find that your employees haven’t implemented a process correctly because (from their perspective) they don’t have the knowledge, tools, or time available to them. A gentle reminder, the feedback you gain in these interviews is to be informative, not punitive. Keep curious and open-minded while gathering all the data.

4. What’s one tool, support, or resource that would benefit your work right now?
As a leader, you might ask, “how can I support you?” Yet, employees often don’t utilize this opportunity when asked. It’s akin to the question, “how are you?” It sounds more like a greeting or formality than a genuine question. Asking about needed support in this way challenges your employees to get specific in identifying a tool, support, or resource that would equip them better in their work. 

At times, you assign tasks and roles without properly resourcing our employees. It’s not intentional, but if a task or process takes more hours than anticipated, what resources does your employee need? Is there a specific topic that many of your employees are mentioning? Is there a clinical or operational process that they don’t feel confident in? The themes you hear will highlight where your practice needs the most training and support. 

After you have completed these interviews, following up with your employees is crucial. You might send an email thanking your employees for their participation and share some of the broad themes you heard. Or it might be important to follow up individually for more sensitive subjects. Follow-up will communicate to your employees that you take them seriously, and they can trust you with their feedback. There might be suggestions you don’t take, but letting them know they were heard and explaining the “why” behind how you’ll move forward will increase transparency and trust within your practice. 

If you implement these questions into your group practice, you’ll get reliable information to make data-informed decisions. When it comes to employee engagement and retention, resourcing your employees to solve problems collaboratively and creating psychological safety will do wonders.