The Haemorrhage You Don’t Know About
Good business sense says that if you want to increase your profit and you can’t increase your income, you have to find ways to decrease your expenditure. While we can look at cutting costs, what about if we also look at stopping an unrecognised haemorrhage that is likely occurring in your Pharmacy? This haemorrhage is known as staff disengagement.
Research suggests that approximately 35% of payroll expenditure is lost in disengagement.
How you might ask? Gallup has identified that disengaged employees record 37% absenteeism, 18% lower productivity and 15% lower profitability.
If you are paying a disengaged staff member $80 000 per year, this means they are costing you $28 000 per annum. Put another way, for every $10 000 they make, they cost you $3 500. Now let’s take the maths one step further. Gallup has identified that up to 83% of the workforce is disengaged…Thinking of how many people are on your payroll, what is the dollar value that disengagement could be costing you?
If this now has you taking notice of why engagement is important beyond the human benefits to your business, here are the five elements that Gallup has identified that your staff require to engage in your workplace.
Your staff need:
1. A purpose
2. A caring manager
3. Ongoing conversations and feedback about their work and the workplace
4. A focus on their strengths
5. Opportunity for development
While this may seem obvious, few pharmacies are prioritising this in their annual plans. Or, they pay lip service to it; thinking that an annual review, a staff meeting here and there and a values poster on the wall will cover it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t.
Pharmacies are reactive workplaces and time-strapped beyond measure but there is something that you can begin to invest in that reap benefits well into the future. Improving the emotional intelligence of the leaders within your teams is a great starting point for enhancing engagement. Emotional intelligence allows leaders to effectively inspire performance through having powerful conversations and awareness around what the individuals in the team require and where and how to focus their efforts. Again, speaking to the rational and fiscally minded, investing in emotional intelligence development has proven to produce two to four times the return on investment.
When you pair what emotional intelligence enables with what engaged teams need, it’s clear to see that EI investment is more than just a band-aid for the haemorrhage, it’s curative and preventative treatment in one.
If you would like to know how TURN Pharmacy Leadership can help support your team to improve their emotional intelligence, please reach out.
