How to Make Sure Your Pharmacy Team is Effective and Successful

In almost any job, you’re expected to function successfully in a team based environment.  There are a lot of reasons for this but one of the big ones is that the success of a business can’t generally be measured based off of one person’s actions. Instead, the sum of all the working parts, and people, determines whether a business is thriving or failing.  

Of course the people you hire impacts how well your pharmacy team operates. Are they hard workers? Do they fit with the team? Are they passionate about what you’re asking them to do? But it doesn’t stop there: hiring a group of great staff is the first step, but certainly not the last. It takes work, attention and investment.  

But just how do you go about building a successful, effective, pharmacy team? Well, there’s no secret formula or magic wand at your disposal. Instead, there are tools that you can use to help your pharmacy staff perform their best. Pharmacy point-of-sale makes it easier to build and maintain that great team. Here are a few reasons why.   

POS makes things easier, and easier is better. Clunky processes, lots of manual entry, and process ambiguity are all things that contribute to employees that are frustrated and not productive.  Pharmacy point-of-sale takes all of your processes and streamlines them so that your staff can stop focusing on minor but time consuming details (Like manually entering driver’s license details when they could scan them instead) and focus on the pharmacy customer instead.  At the end of the day, they’ll feel more successful and more positive. That translates to a better all-round employee.  

When it comes to work, ambiguity is not a good thing. No employee wants to be constantly wondering if they’re doing something right. Pharmacy point-of-sale helps you create specific processes and workflows so that there’s no question about the right way vs the “kind of okay” way. There’s only the right processes, the right steps, the right way to do things. It also helps you to set limits for employees, so if there’s a certain activity they shouldn’t be preforming in their job capacity, they won’t be able to do so without the proper overrides from management.  

Accountability leads to improvement. No employee is perfect. Everyone makes mistakes from time to time. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be accountable for those mistakes. That’s the only way for us to learn. Additionally, in a smaller team, one underperforming employee can have a huge impact. So it’s important to have tools that allow you track specific employee activities. If an employee’s cash drawer is regularly out of balance, or an employee is constantly giving discounts, you need to know and they need to know so that you can work together to correct the problem.  

All of these things combined help to reduce employee turnover – It’s time consuming and expensive for you to train employees. But it’s also detrimental to your team to keep losing team members. Full time staff members may spend as much time with co-workers as they do with family, and constant turnover can have a major, negative impact to your team. But guess what? When you provide employees with easy to follow processes, easy to use technology, and clear expectations, you’re going to reduce turnover and have long term employees who are experts in their jobs.  

Even the most promising employees can fail if they aren’t given the right tools. So invest in those tools because that investment benefits you, your pharmacy staff, and your bottom line.