Beyond Hiring: Building a Practice People Want to Work For

So I've been in practice now 24 years built from, you know, very small ground up to now six clinics.

So it's been a passion of mine to build company culture and also build engagement, both out of necessity to try and help me, you know, retain staff, attract new staff and just to succeed in our market.

So I, probably about halfway along my journey, I kind of had this premonition that company culture and employee engagement are not the same thing.

And I think that's a big mistake.

A lot of practice owners and business owners, just not in medicine, but other fields are making right now.

Not that company culture isn't super important because it is.

And we all do, especially in my practice as well, do specific activities to build company culture, but that doesn't necessarily equate to building employee engagement.

I think there, there, significantly different, and you need to treat them both a little bit differently as well.

Okay, well, let's start with your definition then of employee engagement versus employee culture.

Yeah, so another great question.

When I speak on employee engagement, that's the question I like to ask my audience and just get their opinion.

I think employee engagement is hard to define.

If you pin me down and say, hey, Bri, what's the definition? I think it's If your employees are 100% bought into your mission of your business and helping you achieve your goals, that's an engaged employee.

But I kind of think it goes past that.

And I kind of like to flip the script and invite you to look at your team.

And can you tell which one of your employees is not engaged? And I think that's a real easy task.

And I know when I help other businesses go through this, it doesn't take you long to determine which of your employees may not be fully engaged.

even though you don't have a great definition of it, most of us realize who those people are.

And now the fact is, how can we get them engaged in what we need to do? You know, you talked about happy hours and doing team building activities.

Once again, that's company culture building for me.

And yes, that's important.

But I think those things tend to become expected perks maybe of your team and of your staff.

So I don't know that that's truly driving employee engagement, how we want to see it or define it.

So we know the old adage of if you can't measure it, you can't change it.

So if it's a bit intangible, what are some ways that you can actually measure success? Like how do you know, to your point, like you could look at a few different employees, like what is the difference between an engaged employee and an unengaged employee?