3 Proven Tips to Reduce Employee Turnover in Your Chiro Practice

If you're trying to grow your chiropractic practice, you know how important it is to hire good people. One of the most rewarding yet challenging aspects is determining how to do that and how to keep them long-term.

I want to share with you insights from more than a decade of experience in helping chiropractors and healthcare professionals scale their practices without stress by hiring A-players.

Several years ago, I violated one of my hiring philosophies, and it cost me dearly. We desperately needed another provider, and after interviewing and searching for the right one, we just weren't getting many applicants.

Finally, we found someone who seemed like a good fit. As we went through the interview process, we noticed a few red flags, some past issues that weren't exactly ideal. But, they insisted they were a changed person, loved our practice, and were eager to join our team.

We went ahead and pulled the trigger because, quite frankly, I was a little desperate. I needed somebody in that role and was tired of looking. Now, I give you these excuses not because they're the right excuses; they're just common. But remember, common doesn't make right.

Because sure enough, within six months, I had a lawsuit from that very same team member. We won the lawsuit, but it sucked because it took so much time and energy. More importantly, the impact that it had on our practice cost us dearly in terms of culture.

You see, culture is one of the most valuable things you could build in your practice, and hiring the right team members helps support the culture. But you've got to create the culture first. Your culture is built upon a very specific set of principles.

Tip No. 1: Identify Your Principles

Principles become your operating mechanism for your culture. When we live up to these principles, culture is sustained. When we distract from those principles, culture is metabolized.

This team member did not align with our principles. They said that they did, but their behavior said completely different. They showed up late to our team huddles, often without contributing to discussions. They ate food that wasn’t in line with our holistic health approach, and they’d leave their half-eaten food on the counter for patients to see, which wasn't exactly the best way to showcase our commitment to healthy living.

He wasn't a team player and wasn't willing to support and reach out to help other team members. It was just a nightmare. The wrong employee can literally cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars, either in direct fees or lack of production and growth within the practice.

So, you must identify principles that sustain your practice and guide your hiring process. These are what we call your core values. Your core values come internally from the birth of your practice, your way, your methodology, and the journey that has shaped your brand.

You need to pull these out from deep within. These principles need to mean something to you. When you begin to clarify these internally, you project them into the practice. We ask our team to live up to these principles, and as a team, we're all trying to live up to these principles.

It creates an alignment, and if anybody violates those principles, we immediately sit down and have a conversation with them. That is the kind of culture that drives great brands, and I challenge you to do that. Sit down and define your core values and your set of principles. Then, roll them out to the team.

Ask them which ones they resonate most highly with. Ask them which ones they could do better at. Work as a team to rise to that level. I guarantee you will see a completely new energy within your practice and your culture improving.

Now, I just got back from an incredible mastermind meeting with businesses generating literally $100M a year. The common thing that kept coming up was the importance of having an operator or office manager in place within your practice.

If you're over the $80K a month phase, you need a full-time operator. If you're below that, around $60K - $80K, then you need a part-time operator. They need to be on your team, and they need to be trained on how to be a true operator.

Tip No. 2: Clear Agreements On Role Responsibilities

My next tip to make sure you don't have bad employee turnover is clear agreements on role responsibilities. This comes in the form of an organizational chart. Every practice needs it. That's why we have the framework for you in the Profit Accelerator System.

The org chart helps us clearly define where a team member is operating, what roles they have within your practice, and what the responsibilities are within that role. We can then clearly begin putting together training to make sure that they can fulfill those roles, that they're responsible for them, and that it's clear what our expectations are and how they rise to meet and exceed those expectations.

I have yet to meet a team member who doesn't want to join our team and exceed my expectations. Where I fail is to actually sit down and clearly define what those expectations are. You have to look in the mirror and ask yourself, am I being clear on what I expect from my team every day?

An org chart will help you dramatically improve this in your practice. So, get clear on the roles and responsibilities of every single team member.

Tip No. 3: Incentivize Team Members

This tip has everything to do with two critical things.

Base Pay and Incentives

Pay is important, and we want to do it in a way that they have a base plus an incentive. There are many ways to incentivize a team member, but we want to connect it to a specific outcome that the team member is responsible for.

That means that we have to have a data dashboard, and they have metrics that they're responsible for to connect their performance to those metrics and be rewarded for hitting or exceeding those targets.

Isn't that the way it works for you? You only take home more money if the practice does better. That's the way it should be for everyone on the team. There's a framework for that that we teach you to make sure you have proper incentivization processes in place where you pay out a bonus once you're profitable. You can join our free Facebook group, “The Data Driven Practice,” to learn more about it.

The next way that we incentivize team members is through status. For instance, if you look around, you see people driving certain cars, wearing certain brands of clothes, and carrying certain bags that have everything to do with status.

We often reflect our internal world by the environment we create for ourselves and how we perceive ourselves. So, status is an important opportunity to play off that and allow a team member to be promoted.

This was hard for me when I had a small team of three to four members. How do I promote them to a new level? Crazy enough, it's just simply creating artificial status levels within a role.

So you can have a front desk team member who gets promoted to the front desk manager. You can have a rehab tech that gets promoted to a rehab lead. We're just using different words that let everyone know they have mastery and control over their roles.

When someone joins our team, they're coming into a junior position and embarking on a journey toward a senior position, even if they're initially taking on the same responsibilities. But we do this in a way that's motivating for them.

It's a badge of honor that they have actually mastered the processes and the outcomes of that position. That's why it's great to have a data dashboard that gives them immediate feedback if they’re gaining mastery over that.

And when they come to team meetings ready to lead the discussion and solve problems strategically, it shows they've truly embraced their roles. Imagine sitting down for performance reviews with a clear path to promotion, a well-defined pay raise, and a bonus structure that rewards their efforts. That's when you know you've got a team that's excited to show up and make a difference!

I hope you’ve found this post valuable. I'm giving you the secrets that took me 20 years to figure out! It took me going and sitting at the feet of my mentors who taught me these processes, so I went back and refined and connected all of these pieces for you.

If you are loving this content, you've got to come join our free Facebook Community. It's called “The Data Driven Practice.” It's a community of passionate doctors who are committed to aligning their work with their passions and achieving financial success. See you inside!