ROB Professional Editor Laurie Sorrenson, OD, FAAO, (fourth from right as you look at photo) with doctors in her practice. Dr. Sorrenson has used an emotional intelligence inventory in her practice, as Dr. Fishbein recommends, to learn from employees how the office can improve its culture.
Using emotional culture inventory (ECI) surveys
By Bethany Fishbein, OD
August 14, 2024
If you own a practice, you likely know how your office is doing (metrics, financials, etc.) – but do you know how your office is feeling?
The analytical, scientific side of you might be rolling its eyes right now wondering why we have to worry about “fluffy stuff” like feelings at work – but there is a significant body of research showing that workplaces with a better emotional culture enjoy better performance outcomes in growth, profitability and employee retention.
Think about it – you probably know offices with staff who are happy to contribute their thoughts, suggest and accept new ideas and adapt to changes with ease. Maybe this describes your office!
Or maybe you know the opposite – offices with employees who grumble when they see a staff meeting on the calendar, who politely nod and smile when given direction or told how things should be done differently, and then promptly go back to doing exactly what they did before, complaining all the while.
The difference between these two workplaces is likely reflected in the difference in their emotional cultures. People who feel happy, valued and productive feel positively about their workplace, and embrace opportunities to make things better. They are more likely to be open-minded, creative, engaged and eager to grow and innovate.
On the other hand, employees who constantly feel stress, anxiety, or mistreatment, have a much more closed mindset. They are disconnected, focused on the negative and unlikely to put in much (if any) additional effort to make things better.
Getting The Information
Conducting an emotional culture inventory (ECI) survey is an easy and impactful way to measure the emotional culture in your office. It takes the mystery out of a hard-to-define topic like “feelings” and gives you hard data on how your team experiences emotions in your workplace.
This easy-to-administer survey looks at 10 emotions (five positive and five negative) and measures three things:
- How often the emotions are experienced at work (current state)
- How often one would expect to experience these emotions, given the nature of your business (expected state)
- The ideal level of emotion for maximum performance (ideal state)
The survey is completely anonymous, and respondents can be split into demographic categories to give the practice owner additional insight – some owners/managers have split results by location, virtual vs. in-office employees, by department, or by length of employment.
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In addition to the survey responses, participants are invited to share qualitative comments– these are transmitted verbatim, but not attributed to any particular person.
When you understand how your people are feeling, compared to how they would ideally like to feel for maximum effectiveness, you can see the specific gaps and know where to focus your efforts for improvement.
Addressing the Issues
Once the survey is complete and you review the results, the real work begins.
Open and honest communication is often the first step, so that you are hearing and understanding the real issue, rather than assuming you know what is making employees feel a certain way.
For example, I conducted an ECI survey with a practice owner who felt stressed and frustrated that his employees constantly asked him questions about things he felt they should be able to handle on their own.
This led to him feeling like he couldn’t take time away from the practice, and caused him to pass up an opportunity that would have led to significant growth, as it just seemed like “double the problems and too much to manage.” He wondered if he needed to replace his team, or bring in an outside manager to just deal with these things.
In the survey, we found the biggest gap between his employees’ experience of feeling empowered and the level of this emotion they expected to feel. He was shocked by this, and also surprised to find his employees experiencing feelings of stress and mistreatment!
The practice owner was defensive at first, telling me how nice he was to his team. He shared that he gave all of his staff members important-sounding titles “to empower them,” and gave them a generous budget to do whatever was needed to “make something right” for a patient when it went wrong. He couldn’t understand the results, and his knee-jerk reaction was to hold a meeting to tell his staff members they were wrong and shouldn’t feel this way!
Fortunately, he was willing to hear and follow my advice to meet with each team member, tell them honestly that he was surprised by the results, ask for examples to help him understand where the feedback came from, and just listen without giving “his side” or defending himself.
When he did this, he heard from multiple employees (including his office manager) that he often undermined them.
His employees would follow the policies he set, and then if a patient complained in the exam room or contacted him directly, he would make an exception or go against his own policy, leading his team to feel micromanaged and unsure of when rules should or shouldn’t be followed.
This self-doubt led to them discussing all situations with each other, and ultimately still looking for his opinion before they made a decision.
Armed with this information, the practice owner adjusted his policies, setting them as guidelines and intentions, rather than strict rules and absolutes (i.e: “Patients should be encouraged to see how their new glasses will perform before they make a decision to return them” vs. “All sales are final”).
When staff came to him with questions, he would ask them how they felt the situation should be handled knowing the intent of the policy, and in most cases, would tell the staff member to proceed with the suggestion they made.
Within a few weeks, he found he was getting fewer questions, and felt that his staff members seemed more eager to handle a situation themselves. He had a day off with no texts or phone calls, and suddenly found the idea of a second office feasible and worth exploring.
Fostering an Engaged Team
Think about the difference an engaged team can make in the situations we see in our offices every day where we ask our team members for only slightly more additional effort – adding an emergency patient to the schedule, discussing retinal photos, selling annual supplies of contact lenses, responding appropriately to a patient who requests their prescription, etc etc etc.
The problem isn’t a lack of knowledge on what to do. Owners know the “best practices,” and likely shared them with their team members, with mixed results. Improving emotional culture will help you create a team that is excited to innovate, change and work to make your practice better.
I invite you to conduct a survey and learn more about the emotional culture of your office at no cost – for information go to www.leadersofvision.com/eci
Bethany Fishbein, OD, is a practice owner, practice management consultant and certified executive coach and Genos emotional intelligence practitioner. She can be reached at bethany@leadersofvision.com
