Promoting personal growth: the role of the workplace.

Abstract

During the past decade, our practice has worked to create a group environment to support one of the major aims of our corporate mission: “to promote the personal growth of the individual.” We have developed both a flexible compensation system and an approach to physician-to-physician dialogue that is serving us well. The practice has created a formal process to support the needs of individual physicians in their personal and professional lives. The process began with the realization that each of us has periods in our lives when we need to be able to vary the amount of time we spend at work. Physicians have reduced their workload to pursue nonmedical endeavors, spend more time with their family, or for health reasons. Conversely, economic needs have caused others to increase their workload above the average member of the group. We have developed a system that allows each physician the opportunity to vary his or her workload twice each year. With every cycle, each physician submits a request for an ideal amount and distribution of type of work. We then meet as a group and reach consensus over the final distribution of any residual work that needs to be assigned. Over time, the average amount of work requested per physician has been diminishing, and as this has occurred, we have recruited additional physicians. The satisfaction from being able to control the type and amount of work has outweighed the effort that it has taken to support this process. We encourage every physician to do a blend of clinical and administrative work so as to develop new skills and maintain an appreciation for the work that others are doing. We have created our own relative value system, assigning a value to each aspect of work that we perform. Physicians' time is the most important factor in assigning value to work, so our practice places equal value on administrative efforts and clinical work. We could not have developed our flexible work and compensation system without an ability to have dialogue over difficult issues. We have developed an explicit understanding of how we talk through any issue at hand. We ensure group commitment to our course of action by paying particular attention to the process of consensus building—focusing on and elucidating the topic at hand and checking in with our physicians' assumptions, feelings, and needs about the issue. The time spent in this decision-making process has aided us in developing a constancy of focus in attaining our goals. Our group did not develop our communication skills in isolation. We initially often found ourselves “stuck” during our discussions and sought professional facilitators to help us with our development. We still actively work on developing our communication skills. Group meetings begin by asking each physician around the table to comment on the state of his or her relationships with others in the group. This is a time both to discuss issues and to recall our commitment to deal one-on-one with each other when interpersonal or professional issues arise. We cannot always influence the environment outside of our practices to the degree we would like, but we can as physicians establish organizations that support us as we work to develop all aspects of who we are as individuals.