A slacker in your midst

What to do when a staffer isn't pulling their weight

For nearly 10% of Canadian physicians, finding good staff is the number one most pressing practice concern, according to NRM's 2006 Practice Management Survey. Job markets are tight in many Canadian centres, so many of your colleagues find themselves having to settle for lazy, unproductive staffers.

Doctors aren't alone in noting this trend. By their own admission employees from all sectors spend nearly two hours a day wasting time, according to a recent online survey conducted by Salary.com and AOL.

Doctors are busier than most bosses, and simply don't have time to micromanage their employees. Unfortunately you can't afford to turn a blind eye to these layabouts. Other staffers picking up their slack will become increasingly resentful, patients will complain, and remember: when slackers waste time, they're wasting your money.

To help you zero in on the shirker in your midst we've put together a dossier of the most notorious types — and some handy tips on how to put an end to their slipshod ways.

THE CYBERSLACKER
A Lethbridge, AB, filing clerk is the office internet go-to guy for anything from the latest weather forecast to what the bloggers are saying about last night's Big Brother. "But don't ask him for Mrs Johnson's chart," sighs his boss, a young FP. "For sure he hasn't filed it yet."

Personal internet use is far and away the favourite tool of today's office malingerer. Your practice's net fiend is probably a frequent visitor to shopping sites like eBay, the Canadian real estate site MLS, or other sites offering endless browsing opportunities, such as blogs or Hollywood gossip sites.

Many corporations are toying with the idea of restricting internet access to limit personal use. This is complicated and impractical for smaller businesses, and is sure to breed resentment among all your employees. Make sure you outline appropriate internet use in your employee handbook and bring up the subject regularly at staff meetings.

If you have the staffing flexibility, you could capitalize on the cyberslacker's interests and turn them into a web-savvy asset. Physicians' offices are notoriously behind the times when it comes to adopting computer technologies. Try redirecting this employee's internet zeal into developing a paperless office strategy, or educating other employees about internet safety (unschooled surfers can put an office network at risk by unwittingly downloading viruses and spyware). The new responsibilities should keep him or her out of trouble.

THE OFFICE SOCIALITE
A Regina physician in a mid-sized group practice complains that whenever he goes looking for his secretary she's in the lunch room having a good old chinwag with her work buddies. "It's gotten out of hand," he fumes.

Socializing with co-workers was the second most popular slacking-off method in the AOL/Salary.com survey, accounting for 26% of time-wasting. But tread carefully, doctor. You have to know where the line between goofing off and team building lies. While chatting about last night's episode of Grey's Anatomy might not seem like work, a bit of non-work related chatter is an essential building block for any practice's esprit de corps.

On the other hand, office pals who spend too much time talking about personal issues like boyfriends or money trouble can be disruptive to other staffers, and patients. Your staffers are the face of your practice, and you want that face to be a professional one. Take the culprits aside and tell them you're glad they get on so well, but ask them to save some of their juicier stories for the staff room and gently remind them that when they're on duty it would be useful if they made sure they were at their post.

THE MARATHON ERRAND RUNNER
"I couldn't tell you how many times a week I hear 'just popping out to the bank' or 'just taking the car to the garage,'" complains a Charlottetown GP, who's astonished when his footloose staffers still feel entitled to their full-hour lunch break.

Running errands on office time accounts for as much as 8% of lost work time. Letting an employee run the occasional errand — such as renegotiating her mortgage — on your dime isn't anything to get in a lather about. But you know the old saying, 'Give an inch, they'll take a mile.' If you have a staffer who's chronically out of the office, it's time for a time-out. Tell the staffer in question that wherever possible, personal errands should be done at lunch time. Be flexible: if your employee wants to beat the rush at the bank, let her take her lunch hour during a lull in practice traffic, or split it into two shorter breaks. If a valued staffer has a chronic scheduling conflict, such as picking up the kids from daycare, then it might be time to consider tweaking the practice hours - opening and closing an hour earlier to accommodate employees with kids could benefit your own family life.

THE PHONE ADDICT
"My teenage kids don't spend as much time on the phone as she does," says an exasperated Orillia, ON, family doctor of his junior receptionist. The woman in question regularly jams the office phone lines talking to her friends and he catches flak from patients complaining about extended hold-times whenever they call, as well as from the other receptionists who have to pick up her slack.

Like most things, personal calls at work are fine in moderation. But when patients and other employees are being ignored because a staffer's on the phone with a friend or relative, there's a problem. Personal phone calls accounted for 4% of self-reported goldbricking in the online survey. The problem is your office phone line is your lifeline: if patients can't get through, you're losing income. Take the problem staffer aside and tell them personal calls shouldn't last longer than a couple of minutes.