In just a month and a half, the staff at Roden-Smith Pharmacy more than doubled their Med Sync patient count.
And their strategy isn’t as complex as you may think. In fact, you can easily do it too.
The secret? Staff buy-in.
Staff buy-in is simply when employees are committed to their company’s goals and are personally invested in what needs to be accomplished. It all starts with the environment you create within your pharmacy.
Everyone performs best when they are genuinely engaged in their work, and this opens the door for a healthy and productive work environment.
Micah Lansford, owner and pharmacist-in-charge at Roden-Smith Pharmacy in Clovis, NM, explains how a simple and fun initiative led his team to such impressive results. It all started with everyone being on board.
“You have to get buy-in from everybody. And it can be a slow process. . .At some point in our sync initiative, we [did it]. And so now whenever they see a patient that isn’t synchronized, they just kind of throw up their hands like ‘Why the heck isn’t this person synchronized?’.”
Since staff buy-in leads to increased engagement, Lansford was easily able to get everyone excited about reaching their med sync goals. He did this by splitting the staff into 2 teams and turning it into a friendly competition.
“I gave a small incentive at the end and I said ‘Whoever wins gets individual gift cards to a restaurant and whoever comes in second place gets a smaller gift card to our coffee shop next door. So it wasn’t [just] ‘you win or lose’ – both win but the winners win bigger and have a lot of pride tied up in it,” Lansford says.
Something as simple as a competition was powerful enough to quickly increase their Med Sync patient count from 800 to 1800.
Just by openly communicating with his staff and getting everyone to buy-in to the importance of synchronization, Lansford was already halfway there to the goal.
Take the time to define your pharmacy’s mission statement. What is your vision? What are your values? These things are important to establish as the core of your pharmacy.
Then, it will be easy for your staff to understand new initiatives in the pharmacy and see the bigger picture.
Find out what tactics work best for your team.
For Roden-Smith Pharmacy, a competition lifted everyone’s spirits and created an exciting environment.
“It was really fun because. . .at the end of each day [everyone was asking] ‘What does the spreadsheet say?’ and ‘Who’s in the lead?’,” Lansford remarked. The whole team was motivated to reach their ultimate goal of full synchronization – and they can definitely see the finish line now.
What motivates your team?
