Crappy Jobs Yield Crappy Results: Pay Your Team to Do the Real Work
Because of the staggering shortage of qualified veterinary professionals, operating any veterinary hospital with a fully staffed team devoted to patient and client care is almost impossible. When you consider all the various tasks added to the veterinary team to help with practice upkeep, cleaning, and maintenance, you can understand why employees are struggling to focus on their “real” jobs, and still leave work on time. This leaves your star employees doing “crap” jobs, when they should be performing services that not only bring in revenue, but also match their talents and expertise. Here are four reasons why your veterinary team should not be spending time on hospital cleaning and upkeep.
#1: Your team does not do good work on jobs outside their skill set
You wouldn’t make your veterinarians handle the after-work chaos of prescription pick-ups, boarding drop-offs, and urgent phone calls, would you? That task is best left to your highly skilled client care representatives. We’ve all seen the veterinarian head to the jam-packed lobby, only to get a deer-in-the-headlights look, and hightail back to safety. They know their place is in the exam room, treatment area, or surgery suite. The same holds true for all your other team members trying to perform tasks outside their typical job responsibilities. Your veterinary technicians should not be your housekeepers and janitors, trying to deal with the washing machine with the error message—they should be focusing on patient care and client education. Leave your dirty laundry to the professionals, and let your professional team handle the appropriate tasks.
#2: Your team is too busy to handle the crap jobs
Your team should not be hurrying through sweeping, mopping, doing laundry, and handling small maintenance tasks. They shouldn’t need to sneak in a load of morphine-induced vomit laundry while scrambling to sterilize surgical instruments, calculate IV fluid rates, and snag their diabetic patient’s next glucose reading. Your team is already too busy performing the jobs that require their knowledge and skills. If they aren’t caring for patients and clients, who is? Experienced veterinary professionals are difficult to find, and when you do manage to welcome them to your team, they will have more than enough to do that requires their skill set.
#3: You waste money paying your team to do crap jobs
You don’t like paying people money to do crappy work—especially for truly “crap” jobs below their pay grade. You would not want to waste money paying top-dollar wages to your veterinarians to do laundry and mop floors. Their time is better spent working up a complicated case, conversing with clients, or performing surgery, which all generate revenue for your practice. The same is true for your other skilled team members. Instead of paying your skilled team to clean, outsource these crappy tasks to a professional janitorial and laundry service.
#4: Your team isn’t doing the crap jobs correctly
You likely think anyone can do laundry or mop the floor, but medical-grade cleaning services are a specialized skill set. We’ve all been in a practice where the “clean” laundry comes out with furballs—and sometimes poop balls—from blankets that have not been thoroughly shaken. Imagine using that bedding for your post-op patients, and the pathogen population touching their incision site. Or, think about the kennel that was given no more than a quick swipe with a disinfectant-coated paper towel, leaving caked-on blood and feces behind. The improperly cleaned kennels or bedding can result in a nosocomial infection, which could have been prevented by outsourcing your laundry and janitorial services to a professional company. Let the professionals handle the jobs they are trained to do, and let your credentialed team members use all the expertise they acquired through their education and certification.
Is your laundry still not getting clean? Are your team members spending time doing janitorial tasks? Are you chasing hairballs around your just-swept surgery suite? If so, let your team focus on their real hospital jobs, and allow our Veterinary Staffing Services team to do the “crap” jobs that we excel at. Give us a call to learn more about our medical-grade laundry service.