If less than 20% of your work consists of things you love to do, you are far more likely to burn out. Practice owners should design work with love in mind:
- Encourage staff to set goals, both for their career and personal life.
- Invest in each employee’s ongoing education, either directly through training or by giving employees time to pursue their own projects.
- Stay connected with your alumni.
- Don’t over-rely on standardised competence tools: there is more than one way to be a great speech pathologist.
- Organise around teams: workers who feel part of a team are 2.7 times as likely to be engaged, 3 times as likely to be highly resilient, and twice as likely to report a strong sense of belonging.
- Hire interesting speech pathologists: each person’s “loves and loathings” can be combined with others to make the team greater than the sum of its parts. Assign projects based on each individual’s strengths and interests.
- Discard rituals that erode team trust, like staff rankings based on output-based KPIs.
- Pay individual attention to each speech pathologist. Supervisors who check in 1:1 every week drive their team member’s engagement up 77% and reduce turnover by 67%.
- Schedule once-a-week 1:1 supervision check-ins. Ask four key questions:
- What did you love about last week?
- What did you loathe?
- What are your priorities for the next week?
- How can I help?
Source: Buckingham, M. (2022). Designing Work That People Love. Harvard Business Review, June 2022.
This infographic also appears in a recent issue of Banter Booster, our weekly round up of the best speech pathology ideas and practice tips for busy speech pathologists and speech pathology students.
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