Friends, Family or Foe Test for your team. I dare you!! - a guest post from Lisa Bainham

Whether you are NHS and it's compulsory to do Friends and Family tests on your patients, or

whether you are private, we should be asking our team whether they would recommend our

practice to their friends and family.

This type of feedback provides up with critical insight into how we are performing, and the CQC will love that we are engaging with our teams for this type of valuable vision.

Another form of feedback from your team can be done using an eNPS, (employee net promoter score) which I am relatively new to, but have found it invaluable. It helps us measure whether our teams rate our services and rate their attitude and commitment to us.

Within our teams we will have promoters, neutral or detractors.

Let me explain a little about what we should be asking our teams and how we can score

ourselves.

The work environment

Do we provide you with a good work environment? Do you feel safe? Do you feel supported in your career?

Culture

Are you given opportunities to develop and grow? Do you feel you have support and are paid fairly and received fair contractual terms and conditions?

Equipment/tools and materials

Do we provide you with the right equipment to fulfil your role, including training?

General employee experience

ü Flexibility and good work-life balance

ü Transparent and open communication through meetings

ü Trust and respect

ü Valid contribution to ideas

ü Promotion of good working relationships with your team

Do you feel you are making a difference in the practice?

How else can we know what are team really thinks and feels?

Measuring employee engagement: What is the eNPS?

The eNPS is a feedback tool for measuring employee engagement within our practices.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys.

This is a widely used system within lots of industries, but we can relate it to the friends and family test that most of us are familiar with.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our practice to others?

On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our practice as a workplace to others?

As a rule our employees will fall into 3 categories

• Promoters: Engaged employees with a score of 9 or 10

• Neutrals: Employees with an eNPS score of 7 or 8

• Detractors: Employees with a score ranging from 0 to 6

Promoters are as you would imagine, happy employees that take pride in their work and are proud of the practice and team they work with.

Neutral employees are generally satisfied with their work environment but remain open to offers from other companies if a different opportunity arose, rather than engage and try to grow within their existing team.

In my experience they are come in and do their job and while they are good, they aren’t what I would describe as my people, my team. They aren’t necessarily negative about the practice, but neither are they growers or keepers in many cases. We can however, turn them into promoters if we can key into what makes them tick, what drives them and what their aspirations are (or not)

Detractors. (Well poisoners, mood hoovers, negative nancys, or dementors, are just a few I have heard in my time in practices, and most have a few)

Again, we need to engage with all these groups and see if we can turn them around, get them on-board and develop a better relationship. I will point out that we absolutely must not neglect our promoters when trying to improve our relationship with the lower groups, as they will notice, and wonder why the people with different attitudes and work ethics to them are being listened to.

Rock and a hard place….as always!

How to calculate the eNPS

What is your percentage of promoters minus % of detractors (only using the number of people that responded to the questionnaire).

The answers can be enlightening, discouraging, disappointing, or even pleasantly surprising and reassuring, but the aim of the game is for it to help us develop and grow into healthier happier teams.

We all have varying degrees of employees within our teams and most managers and owners can recognise the different camps easily. My good friend and colleague Chris Barrow has a different version. The employees can fall into 3 categories:

• On the bus

• Off the bus

• Or those that want to throw us under the bus!

It all comes down to the same thing. Get the right people doing the right thing, at the right time (I have to give Pat Langley from Apolline the credit for that quote).

Listen to your team, mould your team, and keep a strict eye on where the company is heading and who you have in it to do this.

I should also point out that as with the NHS Friends and Family test, it’s important to reassure your teams that they are able to do this anonymously and encourage positive candour.

If you would like to receive a FREE questionnaire that you can pass onto your team, please email me at www.practicemanangementmatters or whatsapp 07964867286.