113. How This 4-Part Corporate Physician Wellness Strategy Reduces Physician Burnout Across Your Organization.

In this episode you'll discover our four part corporate physician burnout prevention strategy. A wellness strategy for your physicians that's deployed at the corporate level. It's proven in the real world. Can be installed in a single day.

Just has four parts. But each of those parts coordinate in a way that it self adjusts to match your exact needs for your people and your organization. It's real simple.

You can draw it on the back of a napkin. Let me show you how. Check it out. Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the Stop Physician Burnout podcast.

A physician leadership podcast where you will learn the skills so that we can join together and lead the charge to physician well being. Skills to earn the respect of your colleagues in the front line.

Skills to exercise true influence in the C suite and take back your job, your practice, your career and your life. All of these tools have been proven effective in my 40,000 doctor physician coaching and training practice.

And if I know one thing, I know you're super busy. So let's get started. So back in episode 110 I showed you that burnout's fundamentally not a problem. It's actually a dilemma.

A never ending balancing act. And the only way to address it successfully is with a strategy. There is no solution. Stop trying to to solve it. What you need is a strategy.

Just three to five steps that keep you at the balance point that you're seeking. And the simplest way to prevent burnout when doctors are taking care of patients in a healthcare delivery organization is with a pair of strategies.

Every individual needs their own burnout prevention strategy. And somebody's got to be watching the organization and working at the corporate level to de stress the system. Canary and a coal mine.

Every canary needs their own strategy. But somebody's got to be watching the mine.

In episode 111, I showed you how to build your own personal burnout prevention strategy, your own resilience strategy. And now let me show you a corporate strategy, something we've been deploying into organizations for a decade now.

We've reduced it to a simple four steps. I'm going to take you through the four steps and the communication plan that binds it all together.

So if you don't have a corporate strategy now this is a place to get started.

Or if you have a burnout prevention committee, but they're not effective and don't know how to proceed, this is the structure that will get them off the mark.

I've got a diagram in the show notes, but if you want to draw a picture of this, imagine the face of A number four dice with the four circles in the big square. Just draw that and I'll tell you how to label the circles.

Part number one of your corporate strategy is that everyone arrives at the organization from their training programs without understanding how to recognize and prevent burnout. So part number one is always education.

If you want your people to be more resilient and know how to build their own personal prevention strategy, you have to complete their medical education. Teach them the signs and the symptoms and the strategy components that work in the real world so your people can be as healthy as possible.

tarted thehappymd.com back in: 2010

That's the first circle education. The second circle is crisis management. There has to be a crisis management function in your organization.

Someplace someone can call a hotline and get immediate attention. You can walk somebody who's struggling down the hallway to HR and have the EAP and crisis management people in place.

The most important thing about a crisis management program is that everybody know the number when they need help. Ideally, it's on the back of the badge that you wear at work or on a business card inside your wallet or your purse.

So education crisis management number three has to be a cultural and social aspect to the organization.

Because the way that we build the human bonds that connect us deeper than just our work roles is by getting together outside of the times that we're seeing patients. You need to party more. You need to party enough that you know each other as individual humans, not just as colleagues or co workers.

And the organizations that party the most together and enjoy each other's company outside of work the most are always the ones that stick together in crisis. And last but not least, there needs to be wellness driven process improvement pilot projects throughout the organization.

Process improvement that is focused on wellness and the difference between ordinary process improvement, which drives for larger volumes of patients. Ordinary process improvement tries to make you do more, get more done.

And people don't like that very much because the last thing I want to do is work harder than I'm working now when I'm already overloaded. But wellness process improvement is focused not on getting more things done.

It's focused on removing stress, removing friction, removing the things that get in the way of you doing your job quickly and simply. And I'll talk a lot more about how you build wellness oriented process improvement projects in a future episode.

But suffice to say, when you've got your lean Six Sigma case managers coming around to do wellness projects, people are happy to see them because they know their job is going to get easier as opposed to when the typical project is thrown into gear to see more patients where everybody just groans and knows they have to put up with being pushed even harder than the overload they're feeling now. So the four buckets are education, crisis management, social and cultural and wellness based process improvement.

If you have a strategy now, I bet you can fit almost all of your components into one of those four buckets.

And notice I didn't say what goes in the buckets, although I can certainly show you, especially if I'm on site launching your wellness committee and its strategy.

But because those buckets are strategic containers, you can put any kind of tool or intervention in there to match the specific needs of your organization. It's an infinitely malleable strategy. But what holds it all together and what surrounds the four buckets is your communication and awareness plan.

Your wellness committee, your burnout prevention committee needs to be impeccable in its communication with the rank and file, the people seeing patients.

If you're doing great work to support your people but nobody knows about it, it's like the old adage, when a tree falls in the forest, if nobody's there to hear it doesn't make a sound and the answer is no. You have to communicate effectively what you're doing and the difference that it's making so people know that you have their back.

And communication in most medical groups is absolutely abysmal.

I'm also going to do an episode in the future about how you stand out from the chaos and the overload of emails and text and other communication channels so that your messages from the wellness community can be heard and seen and absorbed by everyone. So in these last four episodes from 1:10 to here, we've talked about dilemma, not a problem, strategy, not a solution, the canary and the coal mine.

Everybody needs their own personal prevention strategy. You have one. Now the only question is, how's it working? And somebody's got to be watching the mine.

The Corporate Strategy I've shown you how to build and how to implement your personal strategy. And in this episode I have shown you the structure of a functional, proven four part corporate burnout prevention strategy.

And it will work not just for doctors, but for everybody who draws a paycheck from your organization. If you want to talk to me about how to build that in your system. I'm ready to go. There's a link for a discovery session in the show notes as well.

And on behalf of your people.

If you don't have a corporate strategy, if you're just relying on their personal resilience to carry the day, if you don't have a corporate strategy and you're a senior leader in an organization that employs physicians, I don't know what to say. You're just not doing everything you can to take good care of them. Hit that discovery session booking link and let's get together.

Let me show you a useful, proven, reliable way forward that self adjusts itself to match your specific needs. No matter how big or small your organization is, where you're located, or what your history is.

Until I see you in the next episode, keep breathing and have a great rest of your day.