Our Anxiety is rising of losing our jobs during covid-19

Our clinics manager just told us today that's all of us are laid off starting from tomorrow, losing our jobs after years of working , and we dont know for how many weeks?

How this virus affected our lives and those who lost their jobs as a result of it, forcing companies to closed down and some to scale down.

stress makes you unhealthy. Stress has physical repercussions, and lots of job stress leads to sick employees. This means absenteeism, or higher health insurance costs for employers.

Depression

Without good coping strategies, stress can lead to depression

Violence

25% of workers have felt like screaming at a coworker because of stress, while 14% have felt like hitting one. Stress puts employees on edge with each other in a dangerous way.

Reduced productivity

If you’re stressed out, you’re not going to be operating at peak productivity. You’re going to miss deadlines.

Problems at home

When work is stressful, it tends to bleed into an employee’s home life. That compounds, and they bring that home stress back to work. It’s a brutal cycle that can bring employees to a grinding halt.

Retention problems

19% of workers have quit a job because of stress they felt at work. If the job is too stressful, you’ll lose employees. Ironically, your best employees may inadvertently be the ones to go because they have been saddled with more responsibility and a higher workload. Sure, they get the work done, but the stress is burning them out.

It is the norm of the day after covid-19 forced so many businesses to shut down . Bigger doesn’t always mean better. Scaling your marketing efforts can create needless complexity, effect collaboration, and slow your team down. Smart planning is needed to avoid these growing pains and keep your marketing organization running smoothly.

 Don't rush.

Don't ignore physical spaces.

Hire high-quality talent.

Invest in quality technology.

Build a positive workplace culture.

Consider attention to onboarding essential.

Delegate.

Examine your current processes to see where you can streamline, determine which marketing efforts are generating a positive ROI, and cut back on what’s not working as well.

 In our clinics we are doing the same we are closing down some clinics temporarily and using some technologists who generate more income and have more skill while others can stay on EI for while until we get them back. We are focusing on keeping the best location that can help people and keep us going in the same time following the rule and order of the government, playing it safe and introduce safety and high risk management protocol of infection control, quality control and focusing on our workers well been, reducing their anxiety level and keep them safe and show them and give them the support they need .

We have to distinguish our skill from competitors so we do verities of exams that others don’t do, we take urgent cases and stat cases in the same days that others do not have time to do, we focus on everyone children and older population , we advertise our strongest point with human safety in mind.

 Our key vertical markets is doing the musculoskeletal sonography within 2 days time that other clinics don’t do or they do it in 3 to 4 weeks booking time , then doing vascular, general and pediatrics so we can have verities of cases to fill our empty booking spots, and we also target any other areas we've targeted for market expansion to help patients to do their ultrasound and imaging exams in short booking time, in secure and safe place with our goal of reducing patient anxiety in the same time .

Being able to scale successfully means knowing what attracts and retains the customers you've already acquired, and leveraging that knowledge for growth that's sustainable, we need to increase our reliability and credibility as a diagnostic image provider by hiring the best in the market, those who are qualified , registered in the field and have the educational background and experience and open for training and professional growth , so the doctors will have credible and high standard ultrasound and imaging reports that make them to select our service .

Think about your team and its current workload and responsibilities.

 Are they equipped with state of the art equipments or at least reliable tech friendly ultrasound machines that reduce the repetitive strain injuries? And in the same time can pick up small pathologies that can be missed by other older machines? This is vital for obtaining good high quality images with less time and less stress to the technologists who are doing the exam.

  Invest in your workers, clerk and receptionists, technologists and market and advertising representative make them feel they are one team to pull together the company and move forward until we pass these dark days of the infection disease that obstruct our way of life.

If your marketing coordinators are also supporting other departments, such as PR and customer service, analyzing performance data, and implementing new marketing tools, they’re doing too much. Go back to step one to streamline efforts and processes so your team has the bandwidth to scale. Or consider adding staff to balance your team's workload and responsibilities. 

Make sure to connect with your people and give them a word of encouragement, it make so much difference in people lives when they know they are valued, and that they are part of a great team and the team not just belong to the doctors and administrators. Give them the support they need, as many might lose hours and scale back to part time and they will feel the anxiety and economical pressure of hoe they are going to pay the bills, rent and food, car and mortgage they can lose sleep , be depressed and that can reflect on their daily task in the work progress and patient relation .

It is like a domino effect. Read and study about anxiety and depression, find way to see how you can help those who lost their jobs or about to be scaled down hours of work, make them feel that is part of the company survival and not a demotion and that later they will be back and promoted when this virus scale down.

Ask yourself: does your team have the expertise needed to launch successful campaigns in the new regions or industries you're targeting? Ask your technologist who want to do new exam, new modality can they learn for example MSK, arm Doppler ultrasound , leg Doppler, OBs us, pediatric ultrasound such as spine and brain ultrasound, and the list goes on as many graduates are limited to do general and OBS ultrasound ,some are refusing to learn new exams .

Give more incentive for those who do more exams and bring more patients and verities of exams to your clinic, and keep those who do more at the front and don’t scale down their hours, use their expertise to teach other technologists.

 If not, should you hire new staff now, or contract out until you have a better idea of the kind of expertise your team needs? Do they need more vascular training, more pediatric skill or more MSK? Evaluate your current team to identify each member's strengths and expertise, find out where your talent gaps lie, and hire for those roles. 

I know lots of technologists who send their resumes show that they are expert on vascular ultrasound then when the manager hire them without bringing them to us to find the truth, I found they are almost useless and then later when they pass the 90 days probation they refuse doing arm Doppler for example or carotid exam, renal Doppler exam and so on, they get lazy and unproductive, and those people should be first to scale down.

Remember that if you sent your workers to collect EI they only gets 60% of their salary back so do not scale down too much offer them 20 to 30 % scale down but be generous as much as possible with every one as more you invest in them they will invest their energy in your company they will be loyal and reliable, don’t be cheap.

45% of staff says they spend most of their time reviewing and approving marketing plans, budgets and campaigns. 42% say most of their day is spent in meetings. 66% wish they could spend more time on business strategy with fellow company leaders, and 55% want more time to implement innovative new marketing approaches.

You have to focus on bringing more business by spending more energy and time on innovation, training staff to learn new skill and study your community needs, If the community your clinic is in having more older people then make sure to have technologists with skill that match the need of those people such as MSK exam joint and muscle, and chronic disease and less on OBS and fetal exam. It is nice to employ technologist with multi sodality like myself but it is hard to find these days, it will take years of experience. 

Making good decisions takes time, make sure to listen to your employee, have regular meeting, don’t exclude someone because he or she point out the truth and the problem as those people care and they want to be part of the solutions, if you don’t know the problem in hand you don’t have a solution they do as they face it every day.

It doesn’t make sense to hire and surround yourself with people who do not contribute ,lazy and have nothing to add and it doesn’t make sense to hire sharp smart skillful people to sit and tell them what to do , you hire them so they can tell you what to do and what is the best way to succeed.?

So save your attention for the most important ideas that will bring revenue and help people in the same time, cases, and delegate whenever you can. Set your team up to be able to make good decisions on your current marketing initiatives, so you can focus on executing new strategies.

 You can run the show alone make sure that each clinic have a site supervisor or a team lead then all will report to one supervisor or manager so the manger can see the report and talk to the director of what need to go and what need to stay, talk about new ideas and exam and how to improve each site.

Because many marketing tasks are recurring, like setting up campaigns, planning and publishing content, or promoting events, so are many of the decisions your team has to make around these initiatives. For instance, which segments or channels should a new campaign target?

Which metrics will you use to track success? What population are you targeting as it doesn’t make sense working with younger age population area to put pain management and bone density scanners as this service need it most with older population .

Create templates for recurring tasks and projects, so processes are standardized and easy to follow. Make sure that all your technologists will be train on the ultrasound machines or your diagnostic machines just in case they do rotation and in this way they don’t lose their skill and speed .Set up reporting dashboards that make it easy to measure and share results.

Let all technologists involve with testing a new machine as they are the one who will end up working and dealing with it don’t just bring it because you like it and it is a cheap machine and you may get a commission from it , this is a bad way of doing it .

Let them make quality check, machine test in real time , visibility research and lets you know the pro and con about it , and it allows your team to stay aligned on priorities and know exactly what their colleagues are responsible for, and what goals they're driving towards, what the new machine is able to do and what is the strongest and weakest point of this machine and share the finding with all technologists. This can help you to find the right fit for your needs, the best machine, best price and can tell you allot about the skill of your technologists and who are the one who is always volunteer to test and who are the lazy technologists who are always trying to avoid the new change and new test.

It’s the central puzzle of marketing: sending the right message to the right person at just the right time. 

But as you ramp up your marketing machine, launching simultaneous, complex campaigns, it becomes more and more difficult to do so. In order to keep up with the complexity and volume of customer and campaign data, you need the right technologies to track, analyze, and optimize your marketing efforts. Make sure that all your doctors and health providers have your requests form, notes , email, new phone numbers and fax number ,always remind them of any change or if you add new surface and exam.

Leveraging marketing automation tools allows you to send highly targeted messages to leads and shorten the marketing cycle. Automated lead nurturing helps you build relationships with customers through helpful emails, follow-ups, and thanks the doctors and providers of sending you the cases.  

How can you grow your customer base and revenue streams when you don’t know how leads are coming into or moving through your marketing funnel? 

When you’re tracking the right things, growth becomes a much simpler task. Focus on metrics that make you customer centric organization ,so you get actionable data and timely user feedback that pushes your company forward. Find out which marketing initiatives are creating value in order to improve results, and deliver mature leads to your sales team if you are with sales company. Being able to properly attribute revenue across each of your marketing activities is key to knowing where to place your resources to fuel growth. 

Basic metrics like lead volume and website traffic are important, but failing to dive deeper means you’re missing out on key insights into your marketing performance, and valuable opportunities for improvement. And don’t just measure campaign results; measure the effort that goes into them as well.

Evaluate campaign performance based on two factors: did your efforts produce the desired outcomes? And did the outcome justify the resources required? Same goes to those who try to recruits technologists don’t just send clerks to be your desk representative if he or she do not have back round, qualification and degree in marketing or sale or at least a technologist to answer the questions.

Many time I go to the convention and talk to an imaging company that have a desk and advertisement and ask a question about the job I am seeking they don’t know how to answer and they just give me a number to call and give me some pens and papers ,calendar and small items to give away as it carry their clinic name, it is like they are a tourist centre and that is because they are receptionist and clerks that can answer specific question and can’t talk too much in details about the job.

With the right foundation of marketing operations, you can grow your marketing organization into a responsive team that’s able to capitalize on customer needs and market trends and then recruits the right skilled people to your company

Teams that embrace the Agile marketing framework stay lean while improving productivity and efficiency, and those who are willing to learn new skill and be part of the team ,part of the solution and not the problem and welling to take the bold step forward to improve the company .

Steve Ramsey, PhD. Calgary - Alberta